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“... everywhere else?” ’ There are some good stories in Visitors Book. I was already familiar with Robert Bernen’s ‘Tales From the Bluestacks’, his evocations of a life spent among the sheep-farmers of those remote mountains in East Donegal. His contribution here is ‘The Rush’, a meditation on the persistence of the unremarkable life: ‘No wonder ...”

“... There have been many short surveys, but no serious study of this important subject until Professor Robert Finlay’s new book. Political historians have preferred to study Florence, partly, perhaps, because the Florentines were always changing their constitution (Dante compared the city to an invalid in bed, always changing her position and always ...”

“... Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, ‘dominated’ the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year, and has made, as we shall see, a heavy impact on many aspects of American life. It has not done so well over here. For this there are many reasons, but let us begin with the most ...”

“... That gave you vantage when you would despise: My bankrupt heart has no more tears to spend. Robert Bridges, who, as Martin says, ‘understood perfectly well both Dolben’s role and Hopkins’s emotions in writing’ these sonnets, noted on the autograph copy that they ‘must never be printed’. Had he become a fellow of Balliol and a Classics ...”

“... as a brilliant writer faded with the years; sadly, she is now remembered as much for having been Robert Lowell’s first wife as for her novels and short stories. It is testimony to Capote’s uncanny knack for self-promotion that at the time of the Life feature, he had produced only a handful of short stories: his first novel, Other Voices, Other ...”

“... Robert McLiam Wilson was born in 1964, which means that Ripley Bogle, his first novel, was written in his early twenties. The novel’s qualities are those of immodest youth: it is ambitious, energetic, self absorbed, bursting with hormonal vehemence and self-consciousness. Structure and sequence (or plot) are not its strong points ...”

“... immersed in Homer, the other in the Georgics, Eclogues and Aeneid. If the turn of spirit in, say, Robert Graves and Saint-Jean Perse is radically Homeric, that in T.S. Eliot and Valéry is unmistakably Virgilian. The equations become non-linear, as it were, by virtue of the several presences of Dante. Recalling early childhood, Proust sees himself trailing ...”

“... guests with more than just the keys to their rooms. According to Thompson’s latest biographer, Robert Polito, even as a teenager Thompson ‘moonlighted as a bootlegger, a drug peddler, a grifter, a pimp and a male escort’. His extra-curricular activities often added as much as three hundred dollars to his weekly wage but, at the same time, demanded the ...”

“... co-authored in 1968. Mr John Costello has produced Mask of Treachery, dealing with Blunt, while Mr Robert Cecil has written a biography of his former Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s study of the Soviet agents who have spied for – or defected to – the West since 1945. Equally ...”

“... means that if you scratched his back, he was under no obligation to scratch yours: Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Ian Hamilton Finlay are three Scottish poets whose work he dismisses where he might have been expected, if only for tactical reasons, to approve it. It is the same with Scottish literature of the past. MacDiarmid is almost alone among its ...”

“... and turned over to small, highly participatory sub-units – a possibility explored in Robert Dahl’s new book Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: but if we restrict the discussion to those issues handled at the national level, the burden of proof is on those who would go beyond Schumpeter’s minimal and uninspiring position. There are four major ...”

“... by Sir Lewis Namier had more patronage at his disposal than Mrs Thatcher has enjoyed: and Sir Robert Walpole and his successors were vulnerable to visits from grandees, who called on him with the word that it was time for a change. As a friend of mine, a Conservative Privy Councillor, put it when I said post-Westland that I was not asking for a general ...”

“... Robert Nozick begins his clever and implausible study Anarchy, State and Utopia with a confident pronouncement: ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).’ Among Americans it is a claim which only a committed utilitarian is likely to wish to dispute ...”

“... appearance of the third volume of his own collected essays, and a short book in which Elton and Robert Fogel, doyen of American quantitative historians, debate ‘which road to the past?’ In these circumstances to go beyond a mere review to ask ‘whither Elton’ is a duty – and for some reviewers a pleasure. I approach the task differently: as a very ...”

“... it comes at the weary end of a line that stretches through books by Peter Blake, Brent Brolin, Robert Venturi and others right back to Jane Jacobs’s epoch-breaking attack on Le Corbusier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, over twenty years ago. Of course, all this has guaranteed Wolfe a readership whose anti-modern reflexes had been well ...”