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“... unusual layout and typography, and for his close association with older poets, especially with Robert Lowell (he co-edited Lowell’s posthumous Collected Poems). Bidart and his poems indeed have all these qualities, but they are not the best reasons to read his poetry. That poetry – especially in his last few books – deserves to be known for the ...”

“... Baby rats. Thrashy rats. Ugly, dirty scratchy rats. Funny, jumpy cute rats.’ And then there is Robert Sullivan’s delightful and revolting Rats, the most exhaustive, nauseating and pleasurable compendium of rat facts ever set down. Facts such as: wherever there are human beings, there are rats. China is where the rat originated, and where you can find it ...”

“... Feeling to the influence exerted on the apprentice songwriter Russell by poets such as Ginsberg, Robert Bly and Ezra Pound; William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley in particular inspired the ‘idea of using simple language to convey something very beautiful’. Russell also spoke about how he wanted his home-studio ...”

“... to Blackstone and Pope to Pitt; and at Kenwood in Hampstead he constructed a mansion, designed by Robert Adam, and a park which remain a high point of British design. Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then ...”

“... Putting on again joyously the hateful harness’. That is how Robert Pinget’s diffident and slightly dotty narrator, Monsieur Songe, describes the process of taking up his pen yet again, and adding one more to an already considerable cavalcade of novels.* Then he crosses out the word ‘hateful’. And then he crosses out the word ‘harness ...”

“... Robert Martin’s book is not one of those literary biographies that reshuffle a familiar narrative and perhaps add a few bits of new information or conjecture. It is a full-scale life, founded on primary sources, many of them previously unpublished. As the first major biography since Hallam Tennyson’s pious memoir of 1897, it has obvious importance ...”

“... sight of something by the shore of the lake: turtles waddling in to end the story in the manner of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ or Tobias Wolff’s ‘Poaching’: ‘They watch those turtles on their slow march and behold those ancient creatures, shell-backed and the colour of time, as they lower themselves, turtle upon turtle, disappearing into the ...”

“... should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet by facet, but the result is rather ...”

“... the 19th-century novel itself is perhaps the most important. As Pew and Silver tell it, Robert Louis Stevenson visits Dark at the lighthouse and gets drunkenly loquacious on the subject of man’s shadowy inner self. When Dark discovers an evolutionist’s treasure trove of fossils, he becomes the embodiment of post-Darwinian angst, and Darwin ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”

“... each of us) better off, while making nobody worse off. Everyone’s a winner. It’s here that Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s argument cuts in. Their main target is the pursuit of growth for its own sake which, as they say, has become dogma for politicians across the globe: certainly ‘mainstream’ politicians usually assume that when it comes to ...”

“... die ferne Geliebte, whose title – ‘To the Distant Beloved’ – was clearly significant for Robert and Clara during the years of enforced separation that preceded their marriage. Schumann had quoted a phrase from Beethoven’s cycle in the opening movement of the Fantasie. Once he had mastered the art of the Lied, making what many consider the greatest ...”

“... Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New Town to ‘see a perspective of a mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the further side’. I stopped at the corner ...”

“... last Central European intellectual, and it seems unlikely that any future disclosures will greatly alter it. Does Sigmund Freud deserve such a detailed going-over? There is of course a sense in which his importance as a European and Western phenomenon can hardly be exaggerated. The kind of attention that Gay has brought to bear on his subject yields answers to ...”

“... trying companion, continually sighing, full of tragic regrets, without making any definite move to alter her general state of affairs.’ He was right, she failed to make the decision to marry her beau, and when he finally published his diaries containing descriptions of his relationship with her, she dismissed him from her life. What Garbo and Brando share is ...”