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“... its stage properties ‘an old Mohammed’s head’ which was probably used in the temple scene of Robert Greene’s comedy Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1590) and the conversion scene in Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1612), a play dramatising the life of the renegade English pirate John ...”

“... millenarian preachers among them) that 1857 marked the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, when Robert Clive asserted East India Company ascendancy in Bengal. In the event, it was gun cartridges that set the mutiny off: they were greased, the sepoys believed, with a blend of cow and pig fat, which would defile both Hindus and Muslims when they bit the ends ...”

“... Robert Kolker​ didn’t find the Galvins: they found him. They wanted him – journalist, friend of a friend – to write a book about their family because they ‘believed their story had something that could be of comfort to other people who are suffering’. I can’t quite work out why. If your child starts hearing voices and seeing things that aren’t there, or believes they’re dead, or you’re dead, replaced by an impostor, and nothing can persuade them otherwise, the book you want is Elyn Saks’s autobiography, The Centre Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness (2007 ...”

“... Marlowe filled the air at this time. Hints had appeared in print, in the loquacious pamphlets of Robert Greene and Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, but more damagingly precise were the reports of Government informers – a flourishing trade in the police-state atmosphere of late Elizabethan London. There are two key documents, generally referred to as the ...”

“... mistress of the peintre damné, Modigliani, and author of an excellent novel about a cancer ward, Madame Six. (An unjustly forgotten writer, Hastings eventually succumbed to alcoholism and gassed herself, along with her pet mouse, in 1943.) Picasso’s creative achievement in these years is fully accounted for, even some of the projects that never came ...”

“... to think again about her work, since she’s nowadays best remembered as the first wife of Robert Lowell, the one whom he drove, while drunk, into a brick wall. The crash necessitated months of excruciatingly painful surgery (recounted in her story ‘The Interior Castle’) and caused – as one male friend helpfully computed – a ‘25 per cent ...”

“... revolution of 1258: ‘When the king agreed to accept their counsel he did not make himself their ward, nor did he agree that they should give orders.’ Can Henry’s desire to make war on France in the late 1220s be interpreted, like Richard’s in the 1380s, as a desire to assert his manhood? And once Henry, unlike Fletcher’s Richard, realised that he ...”

“... tries to rise to as a correspondent, giving exquisite elegies for old friends like Mrs Kemble and Robert Louis Stevenson; even the noble, scrupulous and harrowing account of his loved sister’s last days and hours is improved by an altered phrase. Some things probably came near to defeating him, though he records them desperately. Professor Edel chooses to ...”

“... by this bench marked the completion of the final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and ...”

“... analytical, public self-projection which, by its nature, excludes private expression.’ Nicole Ward Jouve struggles with her early dislike of Carter’s work in a brave but wildly incoherent piece of autobiography that sometimes reads like stand-up comedy: ‘And now here was this angelic-sounding Englishwoman, wading into it all as if nobody had been ...”

“... I have heard the sigh Of Berryman as he Exhaled his everlast- ing breath and leaped out- ward and down. That sigh hangs in the air I breathe for ever and will hang. Fellow bards with connoisseurship will admire the contemporary version of the quos ego formula, in the interrupted words played against the rhythm and the action it mimes. Even better ...”

“... family, so Clancy was doubly betrayed while hardly acknowledged – he grew up with Jimmy Cagney, Robert Mitchum and Clark Gable as his ‘movie fathers’. From an early age he developed what he calls a ‘star astigmatism’. R.D. Laing later told him he had ‘the makings of a first-class schizophrenic’. His problem, he admits, was ‘slipp[ing] onto the ...”

“... him the first issue of the Black Mountain Review and introduced him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But when you saw Andy naked, he looked ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”

“... know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Review crowd, the figure who emerges from Portor’s 1941 text is Austenish, ‘a quiet, tranquil-looking, modest girl’ who sits in a corner listening. Many years, honours, fellowships and prizes later, Paul Binding meets ...”