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“... with Irish-Americans pledged to the separation of Ireland from Britain. The Tory Government of Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, and its Irish administration under his nephew Chief Secretary A.J. Balfour – whose preferment had given rise to the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ – had thrown everything, including its Law Officers, and the resources of ...”

“... Robert Lowell is not difficult to represent as the mad poet and justified sinner of the Romantic heritage. He is the dual personality who breaks the rules, kicks over the traces: he did this in the course of a series of manic highs which came and went from maturity, if not before, until the end of his life in 1977 at the age of 60 ...”

“... intense awareness and a habit of self-expression have been common in the history of the sport. Robert Graves climbed difficult routes in Snowdonia with Mallory just before the Great War and was told by Geoffrey Winthrop Young that he had ‘the finest natural balance’ he had ever seen in a climber. At the height of his enthusiasm he wrote that climbing ...”

“... incident occurs. Here we are close to the art of the stage conjurer: a point well made by Robert Barnard in his concise and extremely acute book. Again, over this long period of time the clue tends steadily to refine and even attenuate itself in consonance with the enhanced acuity of readers. It is no longer at all likely to be the imprint of a boot ...”

“... The current controversy over the Ridolphi Plot was initiated by the Jesuit historian Francis Edwards, who published a reconstruction of it, The Marvellous Chance, in 1968. Edwards claimed that Ridolphi was an English double agent employed by Cecil to entrap Mary and Norfolk. He went on to argue, in Plots and Plotters ...”

“... a gloomy Puritan history lingers, a trace, perhaps, of the ferocious Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards. There is also the eerie emptiness of nature in New England, the dark, wooded landscape that seems hollow, and menacing, without a history. Even the streets of Stockbridge seem empty. No one is around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and another poet ...”

“... Treachery and self-aggrandisement were part of the natural order of things in what Ruth Dudley Edwards, in this double biography of Cudlipp and King, comically describes as the glory days of Fleet Street. The two men had very little in common. Cudlipp, the youngest son of a travelling salesman, received his formal education in local authority schools and ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... libre ou mourir’, but that wouldn’t have rhymed with ‘holocauste fort’. Plenty of Hubert Robert (‘du plus pur Hubert Robert,’ as Jouve used to say). Found a Folio series edition of Restif de la Bretonne’s Nuits de Paris in the tempting bookshop. When I first knew the Marais in the late Forties it was ...”

“... rest of the poetry in this anthology reads like replayed Pound, Zukofsky and Olson. Even among Ken Edwards’s ‘Younger Poets’, there’s a faded Sixties feeling to the rhythms, an angrily nostalgic glow, though sometimes a phrase or a line (‘Teacosies portraying “The Poet’s head in the throes of inspiration” ’) surfaces like a collectable sound ...”

“... higher. In 1949 the combination of a small legacy, frustration at Putnam, and my friendship with Robert Kee, led to the founding of the firm that bore our names, with my wife as literary director. I soon discovered, though, that my temperament is not that of a loner, and seven years later, when the time had come to raise new capital (an aspect of business I ...”

“... principles, but his interest in the decision theories of the American psychologist Ward Edwards brought him into contact with Kahneman in 1969. According to Edwards the human mind was naturally Bayesian: it assessed probabilities more or less accurately according to a set of principles that allowed it to combine ...”

“... There are some curious aspects to Frank Lentricchia’s study of four Modernist poets: T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. For a start, it’s a book about poets which doesn’t seem much interested in poems. Lentricchia has written a lengthy chapter on each member of his quartet. Yet Eliot is represented by ‘The Love Song of J ...”

“... these years. The list of names here, from Val Parnell to Peter Brough, from Alan Melville to Jimmy Edwards, reads like a history of British Variety. Even then, unconsciously a student of Method, she would dress up in gymslip and boater, catapult in hand, to do Monica for the wireless. She went to Hollywood for the first time in the Sixties, when ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring ...”