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“... wondering how to be true to herself, even (or perhaps especially) if she doesn’t quite have a self. AnnieLee lies about her past and says she doesn’t have a family. Sure, she’s got talent, but something is chasing her and giving her the fear, the reason, the drive. Even at this early stage in the narrative, you detect the clumsy fingers of a bad male ...”

“... is part of what is meant by calling him ‘transcendent’), so the work of art is mysteriously self-generating and self-dependent, conjuring itself up miraculously out of sheer nothingness, obedient to no law but that of its own unique being. As a concrete universal, it is as much a coupling of sense and spirit, time and ...”

“... grinds his teeth in silence, no interviews, no comment. Silence of a different sort descended on Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department when journalists started probing after her death: Marilyn had been a phone call away from killing Bobby’s career, and possibly brother Jack’s as well. The silence of those whom Anthony Summers failed to catch suggests ...”

“... class system, a wild colonial boy who stands for the ‘ordinary’ man. There is a certain self-conscious filial piety here. His father, Keith Murdoch, was partly responsible for establishing the received view of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, in which thousands of heroic Australians and New Zealanders were sacrificed to the incompetence and ...”

“... architectural policy of the next British monarch, as well as of the current mayor of Rome. Robert Stern, once a board member of the Disney Corporation, now dean of Yale’s School of Architecture and the author of the introduction to Krier’s latest book, is the architect of the presidential library of George W. Bush, now under construction in ...”

“... came late to Louise Bourgeois. Born in France in 1911, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 and moved to New York, where she worked first as a painter and then, after 1940, mainly as a sculptor and assembler of installations. The catalogue of the exhibition of her work at Tate Modern (until 20 January) consists mainly of ...”

“... after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to ...”

“... refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s to-be-famous children differ from the subject of this biography in one very evident particular: ‘faux ...”

“... contradictions of his being most subtly and most dramatically. In The Double in Literature (1970) Robert Rogers pointed out that the young captain narrator ‘symbolically summoned his double’ by leaving a rope-ladder dangling over the side, as if in a tale by Hoffmann, whom Conrad mentions elsewhere, and that the story conjures up the contrasting sides of ...”

“... be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its ...”

“... unusual layout and typography, and for his close association with older poets, especially with Robert Lowell (he co-edited Lowell’s posthumous Collected Poems). Bidart and his poems indeed have all these qualities, but they are not the best reasons to read his poetry. That poetry – especially in his last few books – deserves to be known for the ...”

“... religious maniac in The Virgin in the Garden, is shown painfully recovering his balance and self-confidence, and learning to experience the natural world with a Van Goghian intensity and clarity. While he develops both an artist’s vision and a scientist’s capacity to name what he sees (he is studying for A-Level Botany), his elder sister Stephanie ...”

“... Ransford has diagnosed David Livingstone as a manic depressive, Dennis Rawlins has discredited Robert Peary’s claim to the North Pole, and William McKinlay has proved that Vihjalmur Stefansson was a selfish cad. Debunking probably was inevitable. These men were all of the heroic age of exploration that began in the mid-19th century and ended at the ...”

“... status is, of course, more doubtful, even where a great composer is concerned. The Stravinsky/Robert Craft dialogues provide a case in point: can these unlikely confections, stilted essays in what one might call the comedy of conversational manners, really be taken seriously? In a sense, yes, they can. Their rhetoric – an arch, Nabokovian, dictionary ...”

“... label round his neck now. Even in its time it contributed more to publicity than to enlightenment. Robert Conquest, as editor of the group’s anthology New Lines (1956), claimed that what the members had in common was a ‘negative determination to avoid bad principles’. What bad principles? It fell to Davie to define as well as to denounce these evils, or ...”