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“... Something is amiss with Robert Harbison’s sentences. They seem to consist almost wholly of last-minute additions. The way out of the impasse brought on by the decay of religion available to Wilson was an authorised version of Ruskin’s symbolic correspondence, authorised by duplicated evidence from the distant past excavated by science, and institutionalised by the artist in specific forms, like the Brighton chalice, also a calyx, a flower on its stem, attempting to work a magic which would inhere in a thing not just in one’s method for contemplating it ...”

“... to take on Kafka, whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and Dirk Bogarde tell tall tales from Los Angeles, where, as Mr Bogarde says in his foreword, anything can happen and anything and everything does. My Search for Warren Harding, Mr Plunket’s first novel, is described on the jacket as ‘The ...”

“... Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought: c. 250-c. 1450 (1988), Dr Goldie is to join with Robert Wokler in editing the Cambridge History of 18th-Century Political Thought, and a volume on the 19th century is to follow. These furthermore are ‘Cambridge histories’ in the classic sense, laid down by Lord Acton a century ago: general editors ...”

“... in 1926, and now brought out in a third edition, completely rewritten by the lexicographer Robert Burchfield. We can take Ludovic’s reliance on Fowler as the synecdoche for a whole tradition; over the last seventy years, Fowler has been the place of first and last resort for English grammatical disputes. Perhaps a chief reason for the success of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... troubled mind. Or so it is said in this compendium of stories, freshly unearthed by the Arabists Robert Irwin and Malcolm Lyons, who also worked on the recent Penguin three-volume Arabian Nights.* In Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange, the storytellers are mostly described as learned sheikhs with vast libraries and, in contrast to the lectrices ...”

“... their marriage diaries and many biographies, but also the music itself, Clara’s own, and Robert Schumann’s highly coded, autobiographical and allusive pieces (above all ‘Frauenliebe und –leben’), which give the novel its structure. The epigram to Clara is the quotation from Schlegel which Schumann placed at the head of his ‘Fantasia in C ...”

“... Robert Bartlett examines with verve, scholarship and gusto the extraordinary story of a Welshman hanged by the neck outside Swansea in 1290 (and rehanged to make double sure he was done for), and restored to life by the intervention of a saint. The Welshman was William Cragh (cragh in Welsh means ‘the scabby’), a follower, it appears, of the Welsh patriot Rhys ap Maredudd ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them, As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour Had made them certain earth returned their love. Robert Frost If anything is safe to love, it is the jellyfish, Aurelia aurita, that pink and silver moon-cloud, drifting wild in every harbour from the South Atlantic to the Bay of Reykjavik; or Hippocampus, monstrous to the Greeks, though shaped like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... connections between, say, a Bolivian dance mask and a wooden pillow from Zimbabwe unimportant.In Robert Smirke’s King’s Library of 1828, now divested of the books it was built to house, there is a new gallery called ‘Enlightenment’.* On the shelves and in display cases you find a stuffed toucan, a Chinese brush pot, an engraving of Stonehenge, three ...”

“... him. The Commander in Chief sat on the toilet, shitting and shouting, and it was grim, Which made Robert McNamara make things up and gag. Airlines, doctors, concerts, restaurants – and politics and girls – Are balmy tropical topics which, while counting the tiles, a traveller enjoys. The King’s College Chapel Choir, emitting ethereal noise, Festoons ...”

“... The Wisdom of Insecurity Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed. J. Robert Oppenheimer Place names are bleeding slowly from my mind till nothing is left but Uruguay – which someone told me once means ‘river of birds’ in the language of those who were killed to make it ours. I think of the symbols they made on slices of ...”