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“... of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at Yaddo in 1948. Gordon had impeccable literary credentials. As a young writer, she had been mentored by Ford Madox Ford, who had her read an early draft of her first novel, Penhally, out loud to him. She was edited by ...”

“... at the New Arts Laboratory in 1970 and of the sci-fi inflected essays of the land artist Robert Smithson, who in 1967 described post-industrial New Jersey as ‘a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass’. In The Asset Strippers, the machines are lying idle but there’s a cunning relay between the ruins of the recent past ...”

“... him at work applying clay to a chiton Vivien Leigh wears as Aurora), more satisfying than the mere craft of snapping. He was clever at making things. There is a Mae West doll on show – it appears too in his portrait of her. She couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t sell it to her. Also in the exhibition are a number of the self-portrait Christmas cards ...”

“... Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous letter to the Times ...”

“... but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building took this form ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... story produces tragic resonances that are beyond Stendhal.) Let me add that in regard to verbal craft, the David story is repeatedly dazzling: in its brilliant and varied deployment of dialogue, in its use of recurrent motifs and of literary allusion, in its subtle shifts of narrative point of view, and much else. It strains credibility to imagine that all ...”

“... of a taxi by David Frost during the expensive year when he functioned as the club’s secretary.) Robert Helpmann choreographed all the Footlights revues in the late Thirties. Things picked up under his regime to the extent that the chorus line, instead of being Dadie Rylands protégés dolled up in point shoes and tutus, were rugby-players dolled up in point ...”

“... his writing on the subject something of that immediacy of practical concern of a writer for his craft which we sense in Ben Jonson when he says that a writer might find in Aristotle ‘not only ... the way not to err, but the short way we should take not to err’. The idea was common, and Jonson is in fact translating from the Latin of the Dutchman ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for Robert Foster and Nancy Fried I am come to this town, over which the sun is shining, the insects briefly silenced in the renewed air of the morning, and the turnpike from the capital momentarily empty, for my wedding. I lie alone in a motel room a mile out of town and two from the campus, the wrong end of the wrong street ...”

“... one early theory, the reason some of the murder sites were close to branches of Michael’s, the craft-store chain, was that the shooter wished to be thought of as the Archangel Michael, expecting the cowed populace to recall the name’s meaning (‘who is like God’) and to realise the end was nigh. The killer’s ventures out to Fredericksburg and the ...”

“... next. The green wall’s disruption of normal circulation is an admirable piece of exhibition craft. It forces a pause in which the syntax of what will follow is established. Apart from a few pieces from the early 1960s and a room of drawings (mostly very small, some neatly diagrammatic, others spidery wisps of tangled lines), all the works in the ...”

“... More recently, doubts have deepened and the practice has come to be questioned at a radical level. Robert Frost’s ornery dictum, that poetry is ‘what gets lost in translation’, has acquired classic gobbet status, and it is certainly hard to argue against that verdict. We like to think that a poem, if it has any value, possesses a quiddity for which no ...”

“... Marlowe filled the air at this time. Hints had appeared in print, in the loquacious pamphlets of Robert Greene and Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, but more damagingly precise were the reports of Government informers – a flourishing trade in the police-state atmosphere of late Elizabethan London. There are two key documents, generally referred to as the ...”