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“... not grapple, as we might have expected, with the literary competition – with Dickens, Eliot or Lawrence – but rather with the alleged critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael ...”

“... since, for ten years from 1921 onwards, he never exhibited; Pound demoralised and, like D.H. Lawrence, abandoning the England on which he had centred his hopes for a new age; Pound in Italy swallowing Mussolini whole. These were the sad facts of the Twenties. Looking at a passage like that, we can more easily understand why Tomlinson has been ...”

“... randomly managing his verse-lines, evinces a far greater contempt for the common man than Yeats or Lawrence or Pound, who so vehemently castigated that man for not being other than he is. Thomas, in a not very considered nor memorable quatrain, has declared himself concerning the English poet of this century who (quite wrongly, I think) has been declared the ...”

“... has clearly drawn from its current vitality, although she might prefer comparison with Mann and Lawrence rather than Howard Fast and Alex Haley. But whatever their literary elevation, these sagas tend to conform to the same narrative movement. At the beginning there is solidarity, togetherness, a spirit of one for all. Then younger members make their ...”

“... period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant ...”

“... pasting of late. During the last century, he was canonised in one way or another by R.W. Chambers, Robert Bolt and the Catholic church. By contrast the More of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historically more credible heretic-burner bent on martyrdom. More’s self-flagellation and habitual wearing of a hair shirt now look less like the pure tokens of virtue ...”

“... had been, handing out large sums at unpredictable moments (for example, to his old wartime friend Robert Graves, but only after they had ceased to be real friends).Sassoon was a great self-fashioner. He was also intensely self-aware, open-hearted (though capable of mean-spiritedness), restless, prickly, brave, idealistic, never content, eternally tussling ...”

“... in the country’s burgeoning university system. Of the great modernists of the previous era, only Robert Frost assumed the role of pedagogue to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the ...”

“... and unproblematic, even something of an anticlimax’. Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Robert Cecil, had without her knowledge masterminded a succession plan, starting a clandestine correspondence with James two years before her death. Accordingly, James had been shown the proclamation announcing his accession that was read aloud at Richmond Palace ...”

“... that somewhere along the line he absorbed the influence, for example, of the Minnesota poets, Robert Bly and James Wright. He has the same candour and simplicity, and, like them, sometimes lays himself open to a charge of naivety – technical as much as emotional, if we can distinguish between the two. But his naivety, if such it is, differs ...”

“... the market was for ‘bilingual’ dictionaries (especially Latin-English). We had to wait upon Robert Cawdrey in 1604 for a ‘monolingual’ model – aimed at ‘Ladies … or other unskilfull persons’. But the principles and goals are essentially the same. We don’t look up door to find that it means the chunk of material that seals off rooms and ...”

“... himself. The translation of the title poem is his own, and there is even one poem, ‘Elegy for Robert Lowell’, originally written in English. It works too, if only as a fluent assemblage of Lowell properties: planes at Logan thunder off from the brown mass of industrial tundra with its bureaucratic moss. Huge autoherds graze on grey, convoluted, flat ...”

“... year’s Don’t Look Up showed the world ignoring warnings from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, but 1998 was the high-water mark for asteroid anxiety, giving us both Deep Impact (Robert Duvall and a team of astronauts blow up the asteroid with nuclear weapons; it mostly works) and Armageddon (Bruce Willis and a ...”

“... I had lunch with a writer friend of my foster mother, along with five or six visiting Russians and Robert Graves. Graves of the halo of curly white hair, not at all good looking, fat and pasty, in his late sixties or early seventies. I sat at the table opposite him in awed silence, gazing, longing for him to speak to me, not daring to say anything for fear ...”

“... he said he will. He is a man of his word. In his introduction to Messages to the World, Bruce Lawrence writes: ‘Bin Laden is not an original thinker.’ What gives these statements ‘their unique force . . . are his literary gifts. Bin Laden has earned many labels by now – fanatic, nihilist, fundamentalist, terrorist – but what actually ...”