“... The antiquity of this figure is the subject of a very learned and also very amusing book by Robert Merton; the received wisdom is that it goes at least as far back as the 12th century. So there is nothing very modern about worrying about what it means to be modern, and even if you think that being modern requires a total rejection of the past, like ...”

“... Comintern’ comes in for further treatment, this time in a long autobiographical essay by Robert Cecil. Perhaps the chief novelty is the persistent implication that the writer, academic and MP, Goronwy Rees, may have been active in the Soviet cause over a considerable period of years. If so, it certainly lends a new twist to one’s reading of the ...”

“... is explicit sympathy for the old dying alone, for exploited husbands and overworked wives, for the young with their fragile illusions: but it is all cold comfort. ‘They’ are marched up and down their streets without much sensitivity, either imaginative or metrical; the flat caps are matched by a flat-footed rhymeless pentameter. Dunn reproaches himself in ...”

“... had a dozen illegitimate sons and one legitimate one, who was drowned with most of the court’s young bloods in a wreck Orderic describes brilliantly). The Normans’ genius lay in targeting the richest and most prestigious corporations in the 11th-century bull-market, then squeezing them for all they were worth and more. They knew how to use the ...”

“... artist, to develop rather than possess innately). While Schuyler and his circle tolerated Auden, Robert Lowell and his reputation gave them fits. Schuyler would define his poetic project, at least in part, by opposing it to that of Lowell and the other gloomy campus darlings of the New Critics: New York poets, except I suppose the colour-blind, are affected ...”

“... wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward ...”

“... lack of grammar and inconsequence’ – comments unlikely to endear him to the angry young men of the time. The Modernists, in the ascendant after his death, took their revenge. In no sense a Pioneer of Modern Design, Lutyens was pointedly ignored in Pevsner’s teleological tale, An Outline of European Architecture. ‘Our greatest architect ...”

“... garden of Ruth’s childhood home. It is a huge, dilapidated structure, in whose sinister pit the young child was placed by her father (‘To cool me off’); it is also the place where the father was neglected and left to die, after a shooting accident, by his implacable wife. But when the ‘ice-house’ returns metamorphosed, as a tomb in the Egyptian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in a school-yard, remembering taunts of long ago. (One of his cleverest poems, ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’, is a tribute to the skills, social, psychological and physical, developed by the world’s heavyweights.) At school, works by Australian writers disappeared from the curriculum once senior classes were reached and the study became ...”

“... Slugging it out with Diana Trilling in the pages of Commentary, Robert Lowell remarked: ‘Controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.’ Mrs Trilling, for all the world like Dorothea Brooke or some other 19th-century heroine of the strenuously examined life, replied: ‘I have never thought controversy bad for either the mind or the heart ...”

“... spoke of his messiah complex and noted his ‘sharp eyes looking out of the same austere mask’. Robert Payne (a profound observer of wartime China, whose books are now forgotten) described Chiang’s face as ‘always the same: calm, detached, unemotional’. The problem has always been how to penetrate the mask. Early contemporaries speak of Chiang’s ...”

“... London and Puritan Cambridge. From 1571 he was a scholar of Pembroke Hall, along with the young Edmund Spenser, under its Puritan master William Fulke, and he effortlessly took on the colouring of his Cambridge environment. He was a valued member of a formidably learned biblical seminar conducted by the leading university Puritans, and the godly of ...”

“... included in Stranger Shores (2001), opens: ‘Born in the autumn years of the Habsburg Empire, Robert Musil served His Imperial and Royal Majesty in one bloody continental convulsion and died halfway through the even worse convulsion that followed.’ A Musil piece in Inner Workings, which takes up some material from the earlier essay ...”

“... occasionally dangerous, peopled by ghosts – miners’ wives or the wandering monks who capture Robert Macfarlane’s imagination in the opening pages of his book. Our push and shove with the land is far from over; in fact you might consider the whole present consumerist extravaganza to be rage against the land, the ties that bind.All of this is preliminary ...”