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“... been virtually denied, by studies of parties as well as of politicians. Baldwin’s political craft, and craftiness, emerge with fresh clarity in this account. Standing for Parliament for the first time at the age of 40, for the seat his father had just vacated, he offered himself simply as his father’s son, and was soon telling an aunt that elections ...”

“... attempt to persuade others that Manilius was worth their trouble. ‘I adjure you,’ he wrote to Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, ‘not to waste your time on Manilius. He writes on astronomy and astrology without knowing either.’ To an American correspondent he wrote: ‘I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few ...”

“... lash to and fro like a dog shaking a rat. Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It’s more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the ...”

“... that the circuit of manufacture and distribution, the bringing into a gallery space of commerce, craft, installation, sculpture, performance and activism, was integral to her idea of the art.’ Each box of soap bears her signature. Like the ci wara headdress, the past reaches Tunde in the form of a rarefied object to which he now tries to restore ...”

“... subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really established him: it prompted Robert Lowell to declare him the best Irish poet since Yeats, and he was widely celebrated by the London reviewers, who seemed on the whole untroubled by the suggestion that the Irish might be constitutionally disposed to killing one another. Heaney didn’t ...”

“... dock. It was the same gunmetal grey as the sky. The only spot of colour was a tiny orange rescue craft, tucked at the ship’s side. I took a photo and was shooed away by a security guard. He couldn’t stop me taking pictures, since I was outside the yard, but I gave up anyway. I couldn’t get a decent shot of the ship – it was too big.The biggest ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... study of Browning’s verse as an essentially introspective art, The Elusive Self in the Poetry of Robert Browning. But the thesis seems regrettably mistaken, in that it generates and enforces a wrong notion of ‘poetry’ as well as of Browning: poetry as absolutely distinguished from the normal world in which the writer lives. In his early years Browning ...”

“... the plantation in Beloved, the mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the bus in Robert Olen Butler’s Mr Spaceman all function as metaphors for the creative writing workshop.) McGurl also provides a smart and useful typology of ‘programme’ fiction (defined as the prose work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main ...”

“... poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he strikes in the phrase ‘deliberately excluded from ...”

“... like this give rhetoric a good name. In two senses at least, they heighten proficiency in the craft of language. First, they enable us to compose more skilfully, by making us more sensitive to what composition involves; let instinct work as it will, it is never amiss to know consciously how every word comes on to the page. Second, we begin to see what is ...”

“... likely to be a reference to Leopardi’s ‘Scherzo’ (where ‘la lima’ represents the poetic craft he upbraids his contemporaries for not using) than to the stone-grinders in Ecclesiastes which is Arrowsmith’s guess, documented again here. Joseph Brodsky once remarked of Andrei Platonov: ‘To talk about his pedigree, trying to fit him into this or ...”

“... Malcolm Yorke says more about ‘excesses of amorous nature’ than friends and disciples do (like Robert Speaight, whose biography came out in 1966), in whose hands his reputation has largely rested. The very presence of a woman was a temptation and incitement: he had Ayatollah-like ideas about women’s clothing – perhaps a reflection of his ...”

“... 14th century; the Van Eycks had forebears and colleagues involved in this production line, such as Robert Campin, who also embraced oil paint. Captivated by pictorial exports from Siena, Flemings were now keen to commission works that stood halfway between the public arrays of stone-carved saints and the little pictures in books meant for private enjoyment ...”

“... Ploughing through these packed and not always fascinating columns may tell us as much about the craft, if that is the right word, of highbrow reviewing as it does about Eliot. On the English side one notices a steady reduction in pomposity, signalled by the disappearance of the reviewer’s plural first-person pronoun – a harmless convention that can be ...”