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“... the Observer hired him to report on politics in Western Europe (driving a Bentley with his friend Robert Blake) and then in Czechoslovakia (a Lagonda with the young Alan Clark). In Tuscany, on the first of these jaunts, he met Bernard Berenson, art collector and maestro of highly paid authentication. Berenson became an intimate friend, and their ...”

“... included paintings by Ernst and poems by the American Modernist Hart Crane, the French Surrealists Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault and the German Expressionist Georg Trakl (in translations from French and German by Eugene Jolas). A decade later, the last issue was still churning out Work in Progress, now alongside work by Hans Arp, Beckett, Breton, Kafka ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”

“... at all for moral courage so that one begins to feel the portrait of Cromwell is as skewed as Robert Bolt’s (or Peter Ackroyd’s) is of More and for the same reason, both men human and therefore venial when embosomed in their respective families. Set against this massive work one’s objections seem petty, and it’s a tribute to the power of the novel ...”

“... to write a comparable book about this time [called] “The Missiles of October”,’ his brother Robert quotes him as saying. ‘If anyone is around after this they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace.’ Following Tuchman, he believed that European statesmen ‘somehow seemed to tumble into war’, because of their ...”

“... and published in English as Anatomy of the SS State, and Uwe Adam’s Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich. Michael Marrus’s and Robert Paxton’s study of Vichy France now fills one important gap, while Randolph Braham’s new two-volume work on The Holocaust in Hungary, massively detailed, covering every aspect of the ...”

“... Israel becomes Czechoslovakia and Nasser becomes the Führer. ‘A thousand-year Muslim Reich, the African continent ruled by Egypt, may be a mad dream, but we have experience of mad dreams and mad dreamers. We cannot be too careful. The echo of Hitler’s voice is heard again in the land, now speaking Arabic.’ I don’t imagine it was in ...”

“... Historians do not really belong to separate species and the best cultural historians, Schama, Robert Darnton, Natalie Davis, Greenblatt etc share much with Burckhardt, not least an exceptional talent for history, but the difference, in most cases, is more than one of narrative order. There is a satisfaction, a feeling of truth in the posing and solving of ...”

“... notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s urging. Almost certainly, after the Spanish Civil War, he seemed to ...”

“... novel of all time. Significantly, what Europe produced in this middle market mode was principally Robert Graves’s I Claudius, the mental escape of a First World War veteran into antiquity, later fodder for a slack television serial. At a higher level, similar reflexes generated a cluster of historical novels by German exiles – the elder ...”

“... I wonder what you think of these?’Tolkien wrote many letters to his Catholic correspondents, Robert Murray, a Jesuit priest, and Peter Hastings, who owned a religious bookshop in Oxford, attempting to prove that this fake universe he had constructed was neither heretical nor blasphemous but entirely harmonious with orthodox theology. Where had orcs come ...”

“... for the purposes at hand. There are a few gaps: Egypt or Assyria from the ancient world, the Third Reich from the modern; and the sources drawn upon could be thought too consistently Anglophone (about 90 per cent of the modern citations – certainly more than the balance of scholarship). But these are trivial limitations. Runciman handles the enormous range ...”

“... began shepherding to publication the novels of Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget and Marguerite Duras, who were soon known as the ‘école de Minuit’. These writers drew on different models, but with their detached sensibility and rejection of 19th-century dramatic conventions, they had enough in common for Emile Henriot of ...”

“... too, but the war made its way into the nervous system of her poems indirectly and mysteriously. Robert Lowell was a high-profile conscientious objector, writing to Roosevelt in September 1943 with a ‘Declaration of Personal Responsibility’ which objected to the mining of the Ruhr Dams and the bombing of Hamburg. He concluded: In 1941 we undertook a ...”

“... backwardness of the French countryside down to Bloch’s own time.Some fifty years later, Robert Brenner was to develop the kernel of Bloch’s insight into a magisterial comparative analysis of the variant property relations thrown up by class struggles on the land across Europe, and their consequences for the development of agrarian capitalism ...”