“... would later be included in his Yale Younger Poets collection, Some Trees. He wrote a send-up of Robert Lowell, whose poetry he couldn’t stand: ‘Mudgulping trawler, Truro in the ooze/Past Peach’s Point, with tray of copper spoons/For Salem’s Mayor Caldecott to suck,/ For his doll’s calico corpse, red-needled in the book’. He discovered Wallace ...”

“... or not I am legally a ‘UK citizen’, but only I can know if I feel British.Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford’s Brexitland is a sweeping and rigorous demographic and attitudinal study of recent British history, which uses the 2016 EU referendum as a way of exploring the shifting sands of political identity since the Second World War. The political ...”

“... walks a tightrope between remote media, genres and historical periods in a chapter that compares Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Bottle Imp’ (1891) with David Robert Mitchell’s zombie film It Follows (2014). The former was published a year after the sovereign debt crisis brought about by the insolvency of ...”

“... willing to let him.’ A lot of CIA directors have written memoirs: Richard Helms, William Colby, Robert Gates, George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Michael Morell, John Brennan. We already have the memoir of the current CIA director, Bill Burns, but not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too torture-heavy to be ...”

“... the 20th century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four ...”

“... A.V. Dicey had three principles; John Rawls had four. Waldron pokes fun at this approach – ‘Robert Summers holds the record, I think, with eighteen rule-of-law principles’ – but that doesn’t stop him drawing up a list of his own. As well as access to independent courts, he says, the rule of law requires ‘people in positions of state authority to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Henson realised his longstanding ambition to present a series of Greek myths in puppet form. Robert Graves might not have approved, but if it hadn’t been for Henson, audiences in Japan would never have heard of the Minotaur or the Gorgon. Long after the Muppets have been quietly forgotten, Henson will be remembered and thanked for Sesame Street, beyond ...”

“... pale mother nourishes her child to the deadly slaughter.’ So oppressive were the rich and great, Robert Crowley declared in 1550, that ‘we must needs fight it out, or else be brought to the like slavery that the Frenchmen are in!’ ‘European slavery is indeed a state of liberty, if compared with that which prevails in the other three divisions of the ...”

“... Ulysses is to the novel between the wars and what The Waste Land is to poetry’, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana ‘is to the travel book’. ‘To sketch the history of the British imaginative intercourse with the Mediterranean in modern times is virtually to present a survey of modern British literature.’ This last, at least, really ...”

“... of her recent battle with cancer. Was she having an affair, pre-Rossellini, with the photographer Robert Capa? (Her co-author describes their love as ‘an association that left them both worried slightly’.) Where did all that Hollywood money go? Rossellini wondered, when she came to Italy, why she had no jewels or furs or other sign of her big-earning ...”

“... is stringent as situation and acquiescent as plot. Elizabeth Barrett pinpointed the malaise which Robert Browning probed: ‘When a man spins evermore on his own axis, like a child’s toy I saw the other day ... what is the use of him but to make a noise?’ And when a man like Horace Nettleship or a gentleman (perhaps) like Waldo Chatterway spins evermore ...”

“... a minority has always spurned the past. The past intimidates, threatens and diminishes us. For Robert Browning’s ‘Paracelsus’, it was written on a ‘sullen page’. The past is regarded as a brake on progress, paralysing creative energy. It is invested with determinative force. It undermines self-confidence – for George Gilbert Scott it doomed ...”