“... self-made, something which delighted Katherine Anne Porter. ‘She has never studied the writing craft in any college. She has never belonged to a literary group ... Nothing else that I know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and the Southern ...”

“... him from imposing such garish humiliations. Or they may be what his American studies in the craft have taught him to leave out. There seems to be a rule against seeming to be excited by a situation. A good instance is the story ‘Vitamins’ in Cathedral. The narrator has ‘a nothing job’ and his wife sells vitamins from door to door. He goes on a ...”

“... of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor spent the last 12 years of her life, raising peacocks and writing ferocious stories populated by ...”

“... of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the introduction offers a personal reading of the plays which is both interesting and quite unlike the way ...”

“... Peter Nichols did not want Miller to alter their plays, but he was more fortunate when he directed Robert Lowell’s version of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Since Miller did not want to set this play in the Caucasus, with an actor tied to a rock, he ‘superimposed another level of translation by setting it in a 17th-century limbo. Lowell was pleased to ...”

“... Tantalisingly, the discussions of Scott’s individual works seldom engage with either art or craft. Nor are his millions of readers considered anything but proof of stooping to get them. Yet Sutherland does take three general themes seriously: Scott’s professionalism, his nationalism and his social climbing. The first two in particular help to bond ...”

“... concerned – one of the lightest-fingered authors living). In this case, the borrowings are from Robert Aldrich’s Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and John Fowles’s The Collector. A best-selling author, Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken body is rescued by an eccentric ...”

“... by more than half the 35 contributors, few of whom bother to make it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy ...”

“... the decent operatives within the intelligence agencies – though, given the requirements of their craft, they are harder to find. Hersh’s work is especially important to remember in the contemporary political climate, when the CIA and FBI have acquired extraordinary – perhaps unprecedented – legitimacy among people who think of themselves as liberals or ...”

“... for cutting. Like weaving, tailoring was learned through apprenticeship and consolidated through craft guilds. As such, it was the near exclusive preserve of men. Women often mended clothes and made undergarments such as hose and stockings for their own families, but like spinning, this work was considered lowly and wasn’t well-paid. Tailors could be found ...”

“... unself-conscious or natural. Even when male literary theorists (such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton) have taken an interest in feminist criticism, they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ...”

“... conformity. But the specialism must be transmitted from generation to generation: if an expert’s craft dies with him, it is not an ideal Way. In the country where ‘a nail that shines will get knocked down,’ too much creativity or innovative talent tends to be frowned on and mistrusted. An expert or a teacher in any field is invariably called sensei (one ...”

“... and has defined his political ideal in ‘a celebrated study of the Utopian Socialists from Robert Owen to William Morris’. Marquis is also, it emerges, a dirty-minded lecher who betrays his disciple Richard sexually and intellectually before being carried off raving to the lunatic asylum. He returns at the end of the novel to lead the fight against ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... the west coast of North America to Europe or Asia. ‘But coming from Asia is easier.’ In 1889 Robert Louis Stevenson, in the final chapter of a wandering life, settled on a hillside above Apia, the Samoan capital. He bought three hundred acres of jungle, and built a two-storey timber house. He was 39 and accompanied by his American wife, Fanny, her two ...”