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“... coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris ...”

“... company for whom Shakespeare crafted striking parts, among them the clown Will Kemp’s successor, Robert Armin. Armin’s distinctive style of clowning provided the basis for a succession of melancholy fools: Touchstone, Thersites, Feste and Lavatch. But even he seems to have been expendable. In Lear’s Fool, van Es writes, Shakespeare tested ‘this ...”

“... as often as through the calculations of strangers.’ She has very good things to say about Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992) too, in which the Germans win the war and cover up the Holocaust. The novel keeps testing the difference between not knowing of such matters and not caring about them: ‘Indifference,’ Gallagher says, ‘is the modality of ...”

“... some reputation, now long gone, in the West. Marlene Dietrich fell to her knees before him; Robert Frost, visiting Moscow in 1962, made a point of seeking him out; he was touted for the Nobel Prize. I once owned an edition of the Selected Stories (from Progress Publishers, Moscow), ransomed from Foyles; my current copy is an on-demand Dutch reprint from ...”

“... a complication has emerged, which threatens to bar our family’s return to its amnesiac state. Michael Collins, Neil Jordan’s film, is not about us as a family, but we are part of its revolutionary story and provide much of its romance. In May 1917, Michael Collins came down for a few days to Longford, one of those ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Monsters and delusions of a more agreeable kind lurk in the stylish, elaborately skilful pages of Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death. Ostensibly this is a detective story, a species of Holmesian charade penned by a paranoiac Dr Watson: yet even at this level it teases the reader with mysteries that go beyond the conventionally mysterious. The story is set ...”

“... was in the Marshalsea. It wasn’t the childhood he wanted, so he hadn’t spoken about it. For Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, in his clever new study, the mass of biographies can make Dickens’s life seem as inevitable as a fairy tale, his genius so self-evident that a novelist’s career was certain. But the alternative lives he might have led, as a debtor ...”

“... history of the antebellum South, much less become a historian of Southern intellectuals? Michael O’Brien has been working on an answer to these questions for fifteen years, and the result is a massive refutation of received wisdom. His first task is to persuade a sceptical audience of the mere existence of Southern intellectual life between 1810 ...”

“... with Ben Jonson, the source of the title, whom Lake eventually gets to, rather like the dragon in Robert Graves’s poem. Jonson had the most turbulent, up and down existence of any of Britain’s greatest writers. It’s just possible that he was the son, born posthumously, of a radically alienated Puritan preacher, ...”

“... effects, just convincing enough to make Picasso’s Charnel House or a group of mirrored cubes by Robert Morris seem not quite right. The combination of ‘real’ footage, digital effects and a complexly motile camera makes for seductive and startling effects, as the ghosts of exhibitions and installations past appear and swiftly vanish. There’s some ...”

“... Kamala Harris was endorsed by most of George W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has ...”

“... of personality by paraphrasing the recollections in his own words. Only Imogen Holst and Sir Michael Tippett have escaped this platitudinous reworking since their contributions had appeared previously elsewhere, and the effect of their words is of a far higher intensity than that of the others’. The absurd though sympathetic grandeur of Tippett’s ...”

“... the best translations are often the plain prose trots by scholars like Simon Karlinsky and Michael Makin which sometimes achieve a rough vernacular rightness by being simply true. Kto ne prokis – okrys’sja! If you’re not rotten – turn rat! (Makin) Tsvetaeva has been as fortunate in her post-humous fate as she was wretchedly unlucky in ...”