“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was a word he often used of modern masterpieces, even referring in a formal speech of eulogy on Robert Frost’s 85th birthday to the ‘terrible realities’ in Frost’s poetry.) The Tertans lose out irrevocably, the Blackburns win irrevocably, and the well-meaning Howe ends up with good career prospects and colluding with the Dean and Blackburn. A later ...”

“... of Lesley Dunn in 1981 (of which, curiously, only 21 are included here) have been compared by Robert Nye to the poems written by Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife, and by Jonathan Raban to In Memoriam. The subject is a precarious one for poetry, and Dunn has not always succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls. Poems like ‘Dining’ and ...”

“... poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old problem. Can deliberate ...”

“... escapes through the roof of the burning building, and departs for New Zealand. In a prefatory note Robert Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things: the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow, enduring, heroic ...”

“... Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, Grew’s Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas Burnett’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Bentley’s ...”

“... of some of her letters in the 19th century. But the real work of recuperation is the province of Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy. Montagu now fills a good deal of shelf space in any library. The term ‘romance writings’ used for the present publication is perhaps not altogether happy. What Grundy has found and presents are (with one exception) short ...”

“... possession of them and then they lose their appetites and get ill.’ Only the ‘robust, hardy’ Robert, older than Jack, and two years younger than Lolly, is never attacked. ‘Bobby has sensibility,’ his father wrote, ‘will love ideas and have enthusiasms, ardours, and will go through more emotional experiences in a month than another in ten ...”

“... inherent in the concept of a canon must be jettisoned.’ It is how he is able, in a piece about Robert Mapplethorpe, to argue that ‘passion, like art, is always irresponsible, useless, an end in itself, regulated by its own impulses and nothing else’ and to propose in another that the best gay writing should be a combination of confession, reportage and ...”

“... layer of non-historical added value: this time a proto-Byronic plot of sex and violence, or as Robert Southey put it, ‘rust and tinsel’. As the author of two long metrical romances and editor-translator of another, Southey was the contemporary poet most sympathetic to Scott. But he agreed with Wordsworth and Coleridge that Scott had gone too far ...”

“... quantity has found its way to the West to merit a compact but lavishly illustrated history from Robert Fisher, a grasp of the current situation needs more explicit testimony than even these powerful images provide. It is obvious from Warren Smith’s marathon retelling of the tangled tale of Tibet and its longstanding relationship with China that things may ...”

“... took a taxi, unless she hadn’t a penny, even for the Tube, whereupon she walked, as the painter Robert Colquhoun did on the evening of one of his openings, from the Colony Room to the Whitechapel Gallery, three miles in the pouring rain.Francis Bacon​ was 39 when he tipped up at the club in 1948. He was introduced to it by Brian Howard, the poet and ...”

“... They were part of the group of artists associated with Horizon that included Graham Sutherland and Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde and very much not, Craxton later insisted, part of the Ayrton-Minton Neo-Romantics. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know the artists personally, and like most people disliked the bombastic ...”

“... tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our ...”