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“... of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies from his parents and getting away with not paying his debts, while the world at large remembers him for pictures showing him in a police van ...”

“... had known. Bromhall’s explosive theory could probably be found to apply to the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, which was announced earlier this month, to muted fanfare. Interestingly, the people who were least enthusiastic about the list appeared to be the people who’d compiled it. The Today programme tried to get a dispute going between ...”

“... had had to pay for being labelled as experimental artists was, it seemed, no longer being exacted. Robert Coover, born in 1932, certainly has no reason to complain of neglect. ‘America’s most outrageous novelist presents a new, wildly comic and erotic entertainment,’ screamed the paperback edition, ten years ago, of his long novel The Public Burning. The ...”

“... in that way too) she is a caricature of her generation. She says things like ‘when I was young and foolish’, ‘you young people’, ‘what is cancel culture?’ She endlessly harks back to her feminist heyday in the 1980s, when she was an actor; she refers to herself as ‘so menopausal’ when her memory fails ...”

“... force. One of the Catholics, a rich gentleman from the Midlands and charismatic energumen called Robert Catesby, called a meeting on 20 May at the Duck and Drake, off the Strand, the lodgings of his cousin and the disciple, Thomas Wintour. Three other men were invited: Jack Wright, a swordsman friend of Catesby’s; Thomas Percy, Wright’s brother-in-law ...”

“... George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one umbrella, and announcing the striking out of New Lines. The Movement was succeeded by the Group (now what was ...”

“... Woolwich, the Arts Council, the BBC and Oxford, with incidental observations on the conduct of the young, the remembered follies of youth, the tiresome defects of old age, and so forth’. Mr Fuller, apparently deaf to this plea, merely gestured finality by publishing the three books in a single volume. However, he has relented, and this new book attends to ...”

“... doctrine that human nature is limited and life irredeemably imperfect. Terminus agrees with Robert Frost in saying ‘good fences make good neighbours’; and he also takes a classical view of artistic creation by insisting on formal constraints and closed symmetry. Although Terminus inhabits hedges and drystone walls, he is not a property of pastoral ...”

“... flying about their heads they ride into a wood: We rode in single file and shortly passed two young men, bare-chested in the sun-dappled shade, one sitting with his back to the trunk of a tree, the other sprawled upon the ground, arms covering his face, bright hair bunched against the brown earth. Both were lazily humming, their scarlet jackets dangling ...”

“... and patrician carriage promoted his career. Todd is not a man who could ever have been overlooked. Young Alex walked to and from school in wretched wartime shoes (those were great days for the profiteers who were said to make cardboard shoes for issue to the trenches). Todd thinks it was these shoes in conjunction with the inadequate wartime diet that were ...”

“... she condemns Lady Audley’s crimes, Braddon also hints, through the anti-feminist diatribes of Robert Audley, Sir Michael’s nephew, that women are frustrated and destructive because they are confined to passive domestic lives: If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of ...”

“... Best known​ for his short prose sketches, the idiosyncratic Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) liked to call himself a ‘craftsman novelist’, cobbling together ‘a long, plotless, realistic story’. He insisted that his varied sketches – prose poems, portraits of friends and strangers, detailed accounts of walks through the city or countryside, stray bits of literary or art criticism, oddball fantasies – were actually fragments of a single work, which ‘might be described as a variously sliced up or torn apart book of myself ...”

“... Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision and the most delicate subtlety the implications of Frost’s rival definitions of the idea of home ...”

“... See another country, learn another language: advice as old as the Greeks. In May 1572, a very young man left England, in the words of his passport, ‘for his attaining to the knowledge of foreign languages’, but attached to a diplomatic mission, something more serious than a mere Grand Tour. He was a participant in the often menacing jollifications which accompanied the finalisation of an Anglo-French treaty and a marriage alliance with the house of Navarre ...”

“... which seems closer to the mark. Perhaps the Penguin compilers should also have reached for their Robert and looked up the French verb blairer, as in je ne peux pas le blairer (‘he gives me the creeps’). Those easily offended should on no account read the following quote: This was not a young man making love to a ...”