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“... a positive feedback, outside commentators often function as fans rather than as critics. Thus Robert Garratt 3 for the most part respectfully backs off from evaluation. He takes refuge in literary history, and in the same way that poets themselves have done. But American deference is the least of our problems from that quarter. Several members of ACIS ...”

“... Theory. A biographer of Keynes has to straddle two very different worlds, and it is one measure of Robert Skidelsky’s achievement that he writes with equal authority of both in this deeply researched and densely textured book. But what marks out his work as truly masterly is his portrayal of the interplay between the private and the public in Keynes, the ...”

“... neighbours. Nevertheless East Europeans are apt to marvel, Miranda-like, at their brave new world. Robert Darnton interviewed, among others, Reinhard Becker, the local councillor responsible for the environment in Bitterfeld, East Germany – surely the most thankless municipal job in Europe. When Becker visited his West German twin town he was ...”

“... trauma, psychological numbing, amnesia, insomnia or other forms of automatic arousal. Readers of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon or Pat Barker should not be surprised that this description of PTSD turns out to have a strong resemblance to the description of shell-shock that has become part of the modern literary tradition: the psychiatrists are, after ...”

“... to be worth passing down to your heirs. Wealthy citizens became discerning collectors. The hall of Robert Stodley, a merchant who died in 1536, contained cupboards, tables, a desk, a bench, a counting table and a chair ‘of English oak [with] a woman’s face on the back’. The lower orders collected possessions too. John Elmesley can’t have earned much as ...”

“... a sadly reduced income.’ But, in general, American critics said yes to whatever Auden gave them. Robert Lowell in 1967 expressed his gratitude for Auden’s many-sided gifts: ‘I am most grateful for three or four supreme things: the sad Anglo-Saxon alliteration of his beginnings, his prophecies that seemed the closest voice to our disaster, then the ...”

“... in May 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best man’ he had, ‘head and shoulders over the average man in the administration’. Attlee ...”

“... whose Flora (1665) Evelyn also pillaged, is not distinguished from John Ray, the great botanist. Robert Boyle appears as ‘Mr Royle’ and is solemnly indexed as such. The editor has no great pretensions to be either a classical scholar or an expert on English 17th-century history; and he deserves gratitude for his labours on a difficult text. It is a shame ...”

“... instance, it was said that as the daughter of Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, and granddaughter of Robert II ‘the Pious’, King of France, she proudly refused a marriage proposal from William Duke of Normandy, on the grounds that he was illegitimate and she would not demean herself to marry a bastard. At this, the story goes, William rode up from ...”

“... and helped sustain as well as satirise the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared ...”

“... behind Mallarmé’s obfuscations and Proust’s longueurs to join dependable storytellers like Robert Stone and Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth Bowen is just as good as Virginia Woolf but without the ‘affected prose style’, and that the selling of high art is ‘just one more form of commercialism’. The break ...”

“... like the mechanisms of character. Big things are happening – we soon hear that Wheeler is on the Robert Kennedy campaign trail, and they follow him west – yet Rose is more than ever alert to the influence of her own past on the new life she is trying to imagine for herself. Her reveries, many of them about fathers and memories, are the best moments in the ...”

“... propagated Scottish notions of liberty, improvement, politeness and sentimentality. Rather as Robert Darnton a generation ago diverted scholarly attention from the philosophes to the printers, engravers and booksellers of Paris in The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’, so Sher looks through all that Scottish mind ...”

“... a reconsideration of the work of three unjustly neglected poets, Weldon Kees, Henri Coulette and Robert Boardman Vaughn – though Vaughn can hardly be described as neglected since only three of his poems ever made their way into print. In a preamble to a discussion of their work he broods on the ‘slide or plunge into oblivion that awaits virtually ...”

“... a crisis on the horizon, but they didn’t foresee just how badly things would turn out. Nor did Robert Moses, who had been in charge of city planning since the 1920s, and whose mammoth housing projects and highways had ripped through old neighbourhoods; though he did say that if his plans for New York were abandoned, trouble was inevitable. None of them ...”