“... 11 short pieces called ‘The Payne Whitney Poems’. The Payne Whitney, I knew from reading about Robert Lowell, was a New York mental hospital, in the same way I knew from reading Lunar Caustic that the Bellevue was a New York mental hospital, and here was a clutch of texts fit to set beside Malcolm Lowry’s book, or Lowell’s ‘Waking in the Blue’ or ...”

“... to co-opt him as chief controversialist against the great Counter-Reformation polemicist Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, and questions of political allegiance and the relative powers of king and pope loomed large in their controversies. Andrewes undoubtedly held a very high religious theory of monarchy, but his role as most favoured court prelate occasionally ...”

“... North & South (1946), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to realise one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity.’ Bishop’s ‘timidity’ is ...”

“... to Washington to report to Truman’s national security aide, Clark Clifford. As a result, Robert Anderson, on the staff of the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, returned to Tokyo with Lansdale and, according to the Seagraves, then flew secretly with MacArthur to the Philippines, where they personally inspected several caverns. They concluded that what ...”

“... aspire only to silence.’ A reply on a par with that of his near contemporary, the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who was once visited in the lunatic asylum to which he had retreated by a friend who asked how his work was coming along. ‘I’m not here to write,’ Walser replied, ‘but to be mad.’ Fénéon’s elusiveness infected the way others wrote ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dramatic events of the conflict: the battle of Teruel, when he, Hemingway and the photographer Robert Capa accompanied Republican forces during their heady initial victories; the siege of Barcelona, where ‘I and a million others saw things which Dante could not have imagined’; the Ebro fighting, when Hemingway saved Matthews’s life by preventing his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we have no right’. Mindful of the ancient Greek fable about ‘the bird in borrowed feathers’, Robert Greene dismissed William Shakespeare in 1592 as that ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’ who dared to mingle among London’s established writers. Meanwhile, in English markets, items misleadingly claiming to be made entirely from desirable ...”

“... the time. Today the two are bound together art-historically in a way that recalls the pairing of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, with Polke, like Rauschenberg, cast as the restless experimenter – the vast retrospective includes about three hundred works executed in all sorts of materials and media – and Richter, like Johns, as his restrained ...”

“... I didn’t hold it against him personally, although I was mad at the people who picked him.’ In Robert Budreau’s film Born to be Blue, Baker plays at about this time to an audience that includes Davis and Gillespie. Gillespie is friendly, Davis is patronising. The playing was sweet, he says, ‘like candy’. He advises Baker to come back when he has ...”