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“... poems about sex – the purple penises and panties round the ankles – was beginning to pall. Michael Roberts, editor of the original Faber Book of Modern Poetry, was also a poet, but it seems unlikely that his own poems will be remembered, Time, as Auden pointed out, worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives, but is apt to be ...”

“... It was just a handful – five or six – but they spread themselves around us, hid behind trees, began a sotto voce incantation made of nonsense: jingoistic rhymes, unsolvable riddles, misplaced bits of liturgy. But rattling as it did off countless boughs and branches, this whispered cacophony convinced us that an army choked the forest. We pictured cities laid to ruin on the roads from here, battalions of starving, shattered men ...”

“... After months of chin-on-chest,shoes scuffed on frozen hillside tracks,day-lit window dulled to lantern glow,papered frame-to-frame with pagesfrom penitential psalms,horizons contracted to the height of a man,how do you choosethe moment to uncrick your neck,to lift your head’s dead weight,you now unguarded, raw again and open to it all,to take the sudden world in whole,and hope your heart will hold?And what if you squander it,look up a second too soon,attention and intention stolen by a dog’s nameshouted in the valley below,a branch brought down by its dry age,your heart’s own stammer ...”

“... The dancers are stretching, loosening in their dressing rooms, half-dressed in a mess of costume rails, water glasses topped with a dusting of rouge. Although it’s still too soon to dance, look at the rush of guttered rain through grids to join the surge towards an open sea. See how the dry leaves catch in corners, petals of a burnt manifesto caught in a breeze between tenements ...”

“... There was a scramble for mementos when the road across the border was smashed up, and there was no way in or out of this province of great lakes and mountains. High on a terraced garden, where potatoes and carrots have begun to replace blooms, a broken cat’s-eye lies in its hand-sized block of rusted iron, and blinks at the house lights every night unseen ...”

“... Soliloquy of the Inner Emigré The authorities asked us to call at noon, to test their new helpline. No one was available to answer our questions. I kept the line open just in case, held the phone to my ear all afternoon, until its ringtone was my metronome. Devolution is a constant process: each week I secede another stage, ratchet back and back from every bloc until I am a law unto myself ...”

“... appeared in May 1932. By the end of that year, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Michael Roberts, Bonamy Dobrée, John Hayward and Graham Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some ...”

“... as it does Bonney on France, Elliott on Spain, Evans on Central Europe, Petersen on Denmark, Roberts on Sweden, and so on. These contributions, which amount to about 40 per cent of the whole, are signed, but they are fitted so neatly into the grand design that the result is a book and not just a collection of essays by various hands. The organisation is ...”

“... Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and ...”

“... Village because nothing ever happens there.’ Perry Scholes, the protagonist and narrator of Michael Symmons Roberts’s first novel, Patrick’s Alphabet, is obsessed with Weegee. Perry is a modern ambulance chaser who patrols the suburban ‘edgelands’ of the M4 corridor and the M25 in self-conscious imitation of ...”

“... names. One of the most noteworthy was The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), edited by Michael Roberts. In 1932, Roberts, a contributor to the Criterion, had edited for the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press a poetry anthology called New Signatures – a symptom of an international rush towards the ...”

“... is a parallel to Lucas’s life of denial, and this is the curious double-standard story of Richie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe. In a world where many cops are on the take, and others are at least keeping quiet about what they know, Roberts not only doesn’t steal, he returns to the authorities a haul of a million ...”

“... than they did at first glance. The idea of an Early Modern military revolution was introduced by Michael Roberts in 1955. Professor Parker accepts and develops the notion. Perhaps the single most important aspect of the revolution was the victory of the gun. In Venice the gun replaced the crossbow in 1490, and elsewhere guns came into fashion in the ...”

“... with a workshop on the ground floor and accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having been to look at a very grand house for his magazine (World of Interiors), the expensive ...”

“... and Paul Giamatti, think of little except doing each other in. Enter Clive Owen and Julia Roberts – well, they enter several times, given the complicated time frames of the movie. He is ex-MI6, she is ex-CIA, and now they work for the imperial companies – to be precise, for the same imperial company, since he is a spy for one and she is pretending ...”