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“... It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976 ...”

“... 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 chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence in ...”

“... Brontë was not yet 21, she submitted a sample of her work to the reigning poet laureate, Robert Southey, together with a letter in which she apparently confided her ambition ‘to be for ever known’ as a poet. Three months later, Southey replied. Though he acknowledged her gift and encouraged her to continue writing ‘for its own sake’, he also ...”

“... Schwartz’s sense of his uniqueness had nothing in common with Lowell’s type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing ...”

“... actions that would jeopardise national order and harmony. That claim of exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a ...”

“... of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business ...”

“... ways of responding to this basic challenge. Behaviourists do what they can to render people’s self-understanding irrelevant: people are enlisted in studies ‘naively’ – that is, without being made aware of an experiment’s purpose – or take part in randomised control trials, in which they aren’t told whether or not they’ve been subject to an ...”

“... dope, spinelessness and pen-pushing in a railway station. Like his creator, Percy is a dissolute, self-destructive figure given to grotesque fits of passion; unlike him he is beautiful, powerful and prodigiously gifted, a haughty, arch-revolutionary Übermensch who – like Branwell himself before he ran out of drink money – arrogantly refuses to serve. The ...”

“... French vers, or lines). It seems the poems still lie in a musty box in the archives. Robert Wohl, who teaches European intellectual and cultural history at the University of Los Angeles, does not say whether he rummaged through that musty box, but he has turned up many a fascinating source for his book. His purpose is to remind us of the tangled ...”

“... to report on the world is still very fashionable, and in that sense Norman Gash’s book on Robert Surtees goes against the grain of present-day literary analysis. It does not go against the traditional grain of writing about Surtees, a novelist who has almost always been praised simply as a reporter of the English scene in the mid-19th century, even on ...”

“... England’s General Synod occurred during an impromptu speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr Robert Runcie was speaking against an amendment urging the Church to delay re-submitting its Clergy (Ordination) Measure to Parliament until ‘after the next Parliamentary General Election’. The point at issue concerned not women priests but the anomalous ...”

“... from his Father’ (which was published in LRB, Vol. 5, No 19) is supposed to be written in self-defence by Hermann Kafka to his son, Franz. It is easy to feel that the relatives of a genius sometimes get a raw deal. There were friends of D.H. Lawrence’s family who objected strongly to the portrait of his father in Sons and Lovers: they denied that he ...”

“... a boa constrictor, and, among Englishmen, Lord Berners’. The presiding spirit was Oscar Wilde. Robert Ross, Wilde’s literary executor, was the keeper of the flame and the still centre of London’s homosexual subculture. When, in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the bisexual Billy Prior is introduced to Ross, the first thing he registers is ‘the ...”

“... Robert Alter established a whole school of literary appreciation of the Bible some twenty years ago with a pioneering book on Biblical narrative. Now he gives us his own translation and commentary on the most literary of all the Bible’s narratives, the story of David. The translation is conservative, fully in line with the Authorised Version (and all the better for that ...”

“... settled on ‘multiple sclerosis’.Towards the end of a long walk on a summer’s day in 2017, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst noticed that his legs felt heavy and poorly co-ordinated. ‘By the time I reached my front door I was shuffling along like an old man in carpet slippers.’ He was in his late forties and wondered if these were the first flickering signs ...”