“... when the hapless consort’s hairline started to recede or his ardour flag. This is the version Robert Graves gives in his Greek Myths, and though Graves’s anthropology is just as shaky as J.G. Frazer’s, I love the poetic truth at the kernel of it. Certainly the question ‘Who is your father?’ only becomes pressing when property is inherited through ...”

“... of particular interest to anyone curious about the first British settlement of Australia, for as Robert Hughes and others have so forcefully reminded us, the closing-off of the North American market for felons after 1776 compelled London officials to find other locations where convicts could be dumped. As James Matra explained in 1783, the British turned to ...”

“... imagery and the often thrilling beauty of his language earned him reviews unequalled for one so young – no one thought that Byron’s and Shelley’s juvenilia promised as much as this. Take Lenora’s speech after her daughter’s murder:                                          It is the morning, And she has ...”

“... period of his major critical successes, Birthright and Body and Soul – the latter provided the young Paul Robeson with his first movie role, following his star appearance in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. Nevertheless, the self-taught Micheaux seems to have lacked a certain artistic credibility. When Body and Soul opened in New York, the city’s ...”

“... a likeness of a pseudonym). But even here there are some odd lapses of judgment: Bate credits Robert Nye with the notion that the simile of the eddy in The Rape of Lucrece is based on observation of Clopton Bridge in Stratford, when Nye actually lifted the idea from Caroline Spurgeon’s important Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), which ...”

“... to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. A fondness for playing roles ran in the family. His father, John Ross, tall, good-looking and a bit of a dandy, spent twenty years failing to complete a Life of ...”

“... Virginia, and by deliberately cultivating the impression that he was a doomed man. As one of the young women he wooed unsuccessfully in his early twenties recalled, ‘he said often that there was a mystery hanging over him he never could fathom.’ Or, as Poe himself wrote in one of his earliest tales, ‘it is evident that we are hurrying onward to some ...”

“... In the years that followed, Dagmar wrote and illustrated a series of children’s books about a young girl who bore Thea’s likeness and birth name. Thea was ridiculed by classmates who sang catchphrases from the animated TV adaptation – ‘Don’t thank me – thank Progress! It’s UNSTOPPABLE.’ She later changed her name to Dorothea to distance ...”

“... that the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, a lifelong Republican who is overseeing the Robert Mueller investigation, is resigning or has been fired. (It had been revealed that in May 2017, only two weeks after his appointment and only a few months after Trump’s inauguration, Rosenstein had discussed wearing a wire to record his conversations with ...”

“... in Buñuel’s film fifty years earlier. As an example of joyous peasant culture, we see local young men vying to pull the head off a chicken suspended on a wire across the street. We see a filthy pig wallowing on the banks of the stream that runs through the village and then watch a child drink water from it. The peasants, who are superstitious, will only ...”

“... media, you would be my concubines.’ One of the weirdest lines of the 2024 US election came from Robert J. O’Neill, a pro-Trump former Navy SEAL who claims to have been one of those who shot Osama bin Laden. Respondents to O’Neill’s post on X, which was directed at a gaggle of young, male campaigners, wondered ...”

“... people who will show you a new image, downloaded and printed from the Internet. It is an image of Robert Thompson as he may look now. Vengeance is evergreen, and the regulars know the image by heart and they watch the door.I don’t mean to marshal these thoughts, as Johnson said, into a school and call it an academy, but I believe people in Britain ...”

“... they entered Elizabeth’s court under the tutelage of Sidney’s father. With Edward Dyer the young friends formed that ‘happy trinity’ of poets, Sidney Striving with my mates in song, Mixing mirth our songs among. In 1577, the all too early peak of Sidney’s political career, Greville accompanied him on a mission to strengthen the co-operation of ...”

“... of the League, he hosted a dinner at New York’s Civic Club which brought together a group of young black writers – most of them still under 25 – with white writers, editors and publishers. Alain Locke acted as master of ceremonies. Carl Van Doren, editor of the Century, was present. So were Horace Live-right, the publisher, Frederick Allen of Harper ...”

“... New Masses jeered at ‘the sex phobia of this six-year-old Proust’ and wondered why ‘so many young writers drawn from the proletariat can make no better use of their working-class experience than as material for introspective and febrile novels’. Roth – who had joined the Communist Party a few months before the book was published – took this kind ...”