“... out of the flesh of the prose as carefully as a piece of glass from a wound. What exactly does the young heroine of A World of Love have in mind when she reflects on her mistrust of ‘the past’s activity and its queeringness’? We could describe these idiosyncrasies as ‘modernist’: an authorial signature or calling card. But their real interest lies in ...”

“... economically in the words ‘uncouth of speech’. The relentlessly reader-friendly translation by Robert Fitzgerald departs from the usual reading to say the Carians were led by their chief ‘in their own tongue’. Robert Fagles, whose version aims at an idiomatic directness lacking in Lattimore, without the sacrifice of ...”

“... appeared confused, irritated or bored by him, classic reactions of age to the heroes of youth. Robert Carringer’s sharp-eyed, dispassionate post-mortem on what actually happened in the making of Kane, and Barbara Leaming’s almost embarrassingly intimate monitoring of the variations in the maker’s oft-told tales during what turned out to be the last ...”

“... of syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high ...”

“... Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a former guild socialist who ...”

“... the purposes of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese ...”

“... concern, all of them, and mine especially, for the power in the house is mine.’The anxious young man asserts himself here in a remarkable way. He virtually quotes an earlier hero, and that makes it particularly hard to assess the tone of his speech. In Book 6 of The Iliad Hector told his wife, Andromache, to go back to her weaving and leave war to ...”

“... On Wednesday, 25 September 1661, we find him making his way from St Martin’s Lane with Colonel Robert Slingsby: ‘He and I in his coach through the Mewes, which is the way that now all coaches are forced to go, because of a stop at Charing Cross, by reason of a drain there to clear the streets.’ He had been down that way the previous October, at St ...”

“... Island was his home. As a schoolboy of 16 in 1951 he was there with a visiting ornithologist, Robert Murphy, and Louis Mowbray, the director of the aquarium, when the extraordinary discovery was made of a surviving cahow on a tiny outcrop not far from Nonsuch Island, three centuries after it was thought to have become extinct. When he had completed his ...”

“... on salvers by Cantonese in white jackets, in the wake of the trays of all-important drinks. A young woman walked, stately, with a flowered parasol, while colonels told about typhoons and a golden spaniel gasped beneath a chair.’Many of the characters’ names are words, so that one occasionally has the feeling of having stumbled into an allegorical ...”

“... as an undetermined field. Twombly studied in Boston and Lexington, and in New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg. The two of them spent time at Black Mountain College in 1951. Twombly’s early works, and many of the later ones, make sense as an offshoot of Abstract Expressionism. But it wasn’t the openness of Kline or Pollock that he was drawn ...”

“... these generalities. It includes Classical buildings – Quinlan Terry’s Richmond scheme and Robert Adam’s computer centre at Dogmersfield Park in Hampshire – as well as jokier numbers – Terry Farrell’s boathouse at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s ...”

“... create a savage divorce between fact and feeling. One is reminded of Monet, at the deathbed of his young wife, irresistibly noting her skin colour – and horrified at the artist in him. In Chatwin, the unsparing clarity of vision and his feeling for the cruel and ambivalent were all of a piece. His prose walked a knife-edge. He respected the primitive – but ...”

“... a point. For instance, she privately draws doom-ridden conclusions from her supposed descent from Robert FitzRoy, who committed suicide, like his uncle Castlereagh, and like her father, who wasn’t married to her mother, but left her his name – which he didn’t spell in the supposedly ancestral fashion with a capital in the middle. That spelling Charlotte ...”

“... the market was for ‘bilingual’ dictionaries (especially Latin-English). We had to wait upon Robert Cawdrey in 1604 for a ‘monolingual’ model – aimed at ‘Ladies … or other unskilfull persons’. But the principles and goals are essentially the same. We don’t look up door to find that it means the chunk of material that seals off rooms and ...”