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“... Bower has concentrated his efforts on Robert Maxwell and (the intimately connected) Geoffrey Robinson, many more are encompassed by the allegations he raises – it is not just a matter of Peter Mandelson but of Bernard Donoghue, Gordon Brown, Helen Liddell, Alistair Campbell and Charlie Whelan. Stephen Byers and ...”

“... of others – a measure motivated at least in part by cases such as Clunis’s and that of Andrew Robinson, a schizophrenic who murdered Georgina Robinson, an occupational therapist in the unit where he was an inmate. The Falling Shadow, the report of the official inquiry into her murder, contends that the under-used ...”

“... studied creative writing at the University of Iowa, under the tutelage of (among others) Marilynne Robinson. The novel he spent the next decade working on got nowhere until a friend mentioned it to the editorial director of a small press called Bellevue. Unlike the major publishing houses that had rejected it, Bellevue was undeterred by the book’s seeming ...”

“... was left blank in his journal. ‘A damn’d unhappy part of the World,’ his second-in-command, Charles Clerke, reported, ‘just as destitute as a Country can be.’ To take possession of such a place was a waste of time and energy – ‘an essential loss’, he called it – and to chart it was ‘nothing but a trifling point of geography’. The ...”

“... Charles Sorley must have been the most brilliant of all the young poets who died in the First World War. Yet ‘brilliant’, with its flashy, brittle connotations, isn’t the right word. He was undeniably clever, and forthright, but also good-humoured and modest, often very funny, shrewd and serious, but never (the young man’s vice) priggish ...”

“... of them with her calm, uncreased prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she converts ...”

“... law: ‘The sheriff thought of all the fugitives haunting America at that moment and sighed.’ Charles Fox is English by birth, long settled in America. He has written for a wide variety of magazines and this is his first novel. Within the field he has chosen he has clearly nothing to learn. Back home again, as the newscasters say, that branch of fiction ...”

“... his name and dates of birth and death. This has proved to be an exaggeration. Thanks to Kenneth Robinson (whose revised Wilkie Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more – especially about Collins’s family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries. As its title ...”

“... introduction to the poem, published for the first time in 2015 by the Perdika Press, Peter Robinson suggests that to issue such a piece in the homophobic 1950s might well have proved ‘controversial’. The homoerotic charge Ashbery detected in Prince’s early poems is often what makes their Yeatsian rhetoric suddenly catch fire, driving the poem ...”

“... broad-bottomed merchant vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around ...”

“... Ginsberg had sex with him – was already living outside San Francisco with his wife, Carolyn Robinson. In 1955 Rexroth presided over a famous poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Ginsberg read the first section of Howl; two younger poets, Michael McClure (early twenties) and Gary Snyder (mid-twenties), read on the same night. So did Lew ...”

“... the estates known as the Dukeries, and raising a prize-winning herd of cattle. In a 1902 book by Charles Henry Lane, Dog Shows and Doggy People (from which Worboys borrows his title), the duchess was judged, after the queen, to be ‘the most popular of her sex in the ranks of the Doggy people’.Alice Stennard ...”

“... them rewrite the past with themselves as lonely victims. Perhaps Mrs Dickens was warm to send Charles back because her mother’s eye could see that he really rather liked the adventure of being a little working-man. Of course one believes Dickens’s autobiographical narrative and – for a certainty – biographers are going to continue believing it ...”

“... poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when the older generation in my family ...”

“... and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ingratiating themselves with China’s ...”