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“... spartan; it’s now a tiny staff room. Jim and Helen barely used it: one of their visitors, Duncan Robinson, remembered their ‘austere, almost invalid evening meal’, sometimes followed by their two indulgences: ‘very dark bitter chocolate, eaten in very small quantities’, and the occasional half bottle of burgundy or claret, kept in a cupboard under ...”

“... her life are known only scantly. In the absence of any comprehensive account of Bishop’s life, David Kalstone seems to have opted for an approach to the poet that might be termed semi-biographical. There are frustrations that attend even his scrupulous and sympathetic discussion of Bishop and her friendships with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. The ...”

“... And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and more and more, all well-known and all made new. That shock of the familiar, the celebrity instantly recognisable by the trademark logo that the artist reinvents distinctively as his or her own, defines the genre that Reaves has discovered and ...”

“... the hint from Wyndham Lewis: if so, it is explicable that his account of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe makes them seem like Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, respectively. In The Great Cat Massacre (1984) Robert Darnton described a night in Paris in the late 1730s when two apprentice printers went on the hunt for cats and staged a mock-trial before ...”

“... apparently claimed £2000 to install a drainage pipe under his tennis court. As the BBC’s Nick Robinson remarked, ‘the political class has lost control of this story. No one knows where it’s going.’ 11 May. To Westminster. Entire place traumatised. No one talking about anything else. The Speaker gave a right bollocking to Kate Hoey and Norman Baker ...”

“... introduction to the poem, published for the first time in 2015 by the Perdika Press, Peter Robinson suggests that to issue such a piece in the homophobic 1950s might well have proved ‘controversial’. The homoerotic charge Ashbery detected in Prince’s early poems is often what makes their Yeatsian rhetoric suddenly catch fire, driving the poem ...”

“... Oakey, from Sheffield, was a hospital porter; he lived for alienation, the post-industrial, David Bowie, and having a show-stopping haircut. He was the singer in the Human League. His hair was long on one side, covering the entire right half of his face, and short on the other. He ‘had the perfect postmodernist haircut for the perfect postmodernist ...”

“... womanly, suffused with the traditional female vices of profligacy and sensuality. If Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was Economic Man in the heroic mode, he was shadowed by Economic Woman: Moll Flanders, the emblem of an age of passions run rampant. Not everyone shared this pessimism. A very different mood could also be found in Enlightenment Britain, as ...”

“... of experience, if only one of several made available by verse. To set Sleeping rough beside Peter Robinson’s latest recension, This Other Life, is to recover a sense of the depths which belong to places which exist then as well as there. Robinson’s fidelity to life’s temporal infrastructure, its recessive inward ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... problem of free choice.The Green pulpit can descend to quite low levels of abuse, but Marilynne Robinson’s Mother Country is witty as well as vicious. It combines ghoulish glee over the horrors of plutonium manufactured in Sellafield and dispersed along the Cumbrian coast, with satire against the quaint insincerities of the British. Her comic touch is so ...”

“... his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with David McDuff’s new translation of The Idiot and some other holiday books. When I say I want to write about Himself Alone, he exclaims: ‘A thick brick like that! I ...”

“... put up. It’s certainly an interesting legacy for an Olympic city. ‘Between 1919 and 1923,’ David Gilmour writes, ‘there were more than seven hundred political assassinations in Catalonia’; and Temma Kaplan documents in some detail a large number of bombings, strikes and executions. The bourgeois paradise was also the Anarchists’ headquarters, and ...”

“... presenting the massaged facts that took us to war, and dealing with the press after the death of David Kelly. He was a gleeful fixer, bully and phrase-maker for a prime minister who had streamlined the Labour Party (as in discarded anything that smacked of socialism) until it was indistinguishable from the Tories, and oversaw a government obsessed with ...”

“... dependent family members was common, if resented. In the 1740s, the young bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson (later Montagu) was appalled to find that her mother had read and disapproved of a flippant letter she had written to her sister. Nor cou’d I imagine that I was writing what anyone wou’d read except [Sarah] herself; if I had thought so, I give you ...”