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“... of curiosity: historical, technical, geographical. The result falls short of the masterpiece that Robert Penn Warren hails on the jacket. It needs a bigger and better-stocked mind to carry the reader from one individually satisfying sketch to another over such a long span. But for a writer’s first published book it is a formidable achievement, combining the ...”

“... added treasures to the Louvre. The same holds true for some of Manion’s female husbands. Robert Shurtliff, an American soldier in the War of Independence, also known as Deborah Sampson, was celebrated for acting out of the ‘purest patriotism’ and without ‘any selfish motives’. When the British soldier James ...”

“... buccaneers to consider, including Hannah Snell, who enlisted in a regiment of marines as James Gray and survived the sieges of Pondicherry and Devicotta undetected before outing herself to the public in 1750. Still, Barry’s was as spectacular a tale of imposture as any novelist of sensation could have dreamed up. It was a case that fascinated the eminent ...”

“... as the scion of two prominent abolitionist families, at the views of the Beagle’s Tory Captain Robert FitzRoy concerning slavery in Brazil. But whereas Desmond and Moore are content to remark that ‘in his Whig heart Darwin knew wrong from right,’ Browne goes on to point out that however sincerely and vehemently the Darwins and Wedgwoods opposed ...”

“... beds are sailing into a harbour where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral. The translation is Robert Hass’s, in The Essential Neruda. And here is the end of a poem called ‘Those Lives’, from Isla Negra: Y si algo vi en mi vida fue una tarde en la India, en las márgenes de un río: arder una mujer de carne y hueso y no sé si era el alma o era el ...”

“... you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes – it made him sick to look, but he had to look ... Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunise him, he could still never ...”

“... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...”

“... no word for understatement. She won prizes but less international recognition than her warm friend Robert Lowell, who consistently celebrated her: Dear Elizabeth, Half New-Englander, half fugitive Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board – Unable to settle anywhere, or live Our usual roaring sublime. Elizabeth Bishop certainly never roared. In this ...”

“... departure to America, from whose prosperous shores nostalgic tourists would return to visit ‘the gray ruin and the mouldering stone’ of England. Her essay ‘On the Pleasure to be extracted front Objects of Terror’ analysed the Gothic mode as just that. It was a kind of reductio for literary purposes of Burke’s notion of the sublime as the ...”

“... Robert Stone​ was the feral child of American literature. He arrived in the world with no one to explain or defend him, except his mother, Gladys. About her we know only stray bits of personal history. The chief evidence that Stone’s father existed is the fact of Stone himself. All other claims – that he was a railroad detective, was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next ...”

“... concerned – one of the lightest-fingered authors living). In this case, the borrowings are from Robert Aldrich’s Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and John Fowles’s The Collector. A best-selling author, Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken body is rescued by an eccentric ...”

“... end of his life Levi was much exercised by the growing denial of the historical fact, famously by Robert Faurisson, but also by children Levi talked to, and the ground of his distress is more crowded and intricate than it looks, and its consequences get more and more troubling. The reason anyone would want to deny the Holocaust and the reason they can are one ...”

“... Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, Grew’s Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas Burnett’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Bentley’s ...”

“... history of the British Isles, already a private scholarly enthusiasm in the 1750s of England’s Gray and Percy and Scotland’s Macpherson, becomes a minor publishing revolution half a century later, just in time for Scott to grab a sizeable share in it. Though credited with editing over seventy volumes of works from the historical canon, Scott was not ...”

“... styles. Cary’s pioneering version of 1805 was predominantly Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such ...”