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“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”

“... poets especially have been very keen on remembering what they haven’t done. I’m thinking of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the unrealised walk in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel ...”

“... the main character, a photography professor called Tunde, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but frost zones are not the point. ‘You can’t do that here,’ a voice calls out. ‘This is private property.’ The property owner doesn’t specify the threat Tunde poses. It may be the act of having set up a tripod, the taking of the photograph or his ...”

“... Sun, there was no secret made about the fact. Nonetheless Amis wrote under the pseudonym ‘Robert Markham’. Presumably this indicates some sort of functional schizophrenia, a way of not being Amis while writing a very un-Amis-like book, yet at the same time receiving royalties into the Amis bank account. (Fleming, of course, was the biggest earner ...”

“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”

“... Dan Bern. His parents moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa, where Bern was born, round about the time that Robert Zimmerman started calling himself Bob Dylan and left Hibbing, Minnesota, to head circuitously east for New York City. Where Bern stands in relation to Dylan isn’t straightforward. He isn’t anything so crude as a tribute act: he performs his own ...”

“... alone have the qualities which ensure success.’ The youthful and inexperienced naval officer Robert Scott was taken up by Markham and eventually given the job of reaching the Pole ahead of the suspiciously efficient Norwegian, Amundsen. There was talk of science to seal the legitimacy of the enterprise – meteorology, geomagnetism and mapping – but ...”

“... even followed the Marvel Comics series Thor, will already know about Odin and Loki, fire giants, frost giants and the Midgard Serpent. But it’s astonishing how much of what we know comes from a single source, Snorri Sturluson’s 13th-century Prose Edda, and how little we know outside it. The attempts made by Scandinavian archaeologists to reimagine the ...”

“... 20th century, among them Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette Howland, born in 1937, a Jewish writer from a working-class neighbourhood in ...”

“... her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1974 Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is ...”

“... 1945 – the Cold War standing in this case as both analogy and warning. In Return to Cold War, Robert Legvold – a specialist in post-Soviet foreign policy and regular contributor to Foreign Affairs – sees worrying similarities between the current situation and the early stages of the Cold War (c.1948-53), focusing in particular on the rhetorical ...”

“... in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems … She wrote some great things – saw strangely – makes one shudder with new truths – but ever and again one feels (or ...”

“... arrange it, before emerging a free and in Thatcher’s eyes dangerously attractive man.) There was Robert Armstrong, saving her from this fiasco, if not from one of her more ridiculous but sinister attempts to sustain state secrecy – but all the while murmuring that he thought Aids the greatest challenge to any government in his lifetime. And then as the ...”

“... Tyndall’s fellow Queenwood teachers, Edward Frankland, had been invited to work with the chemist Robert Bunsen in Marburg, and in 1848 Tyndall decided to join him in Germany and study for a PhD, using his savings from railway surveying. In Marburg, he rose at 5 a.m., sitting in the cold in a dressing gown lined with cat fur, and worked on ...”

“... the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke ...”