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“... For a spell during the 1960s, Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ may have been the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going ...”

“... moved on, surely reasonably, to 1914-18. Reminiscent in some ways of Paul Fussell’s work, and of Robert Wohl’s The Generation of 1914 in others, this book has a thesis. Like Wolff’s, it works outward from particular occasions to generalisations. One is the first night of Le Sacre du Printemps in May 1913, ‘a milestone in the development of ...”

“... of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the introduction offers a personal reading of the plays which is both interesting and quite unlike the way ...”

“... The antiquity of this figure is the subject of a very learned and also very amusing book by Robert Merton; the received wisdom is that it goes at least as far back as the 12th century. So there is nothing very modern about worrying about what it means to be modern, and even if you think that being modern requires a total rejection of the past, like ...”

“... or I find I lose ground ‘I am nothing, if not critical.’ The predicament is one which Robert Hughes shares with Hazlitt, of whom Keats gamely wrote: ‘if ever I am damn’d – damn me if I shouldn’t like him to damn me.’ In Culture of Complaint (a bestseller in the US), Hughes damns damn near everybody. He follows the uncompromising American ...”

“... to the full-page portrait of the photographer read ‘The Greatest War-Photographer in the World: Robert Capa’. Life also ran the story and described how Capa had crossed the river Segre with the troops the night before the action. During the next few years Capa filed pictures of war and its aftermath from China, Normandy, Sicily and Africa. His pictures of ...”

“... her (she makes him hit her during sex); and he falls into the hands of the swaggering evil abuser Frank, whose punchline, before Jeffrey is horribly beaten, is: ‘You’re like me.’ That Jeffrey has struck Dorothy makes this plausible: we see him later weep with remorse at the memory, and it gives him something to expiate at the climax, in which he ...”

“... grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden ...”

“... socialism of James Connolly, two of the 16 who, along with MacBride, were executed in 1916. Robert Wohl in his book The Generation of 1914 writes about the vogue of martial mysticism that took hold all over Europe at the time, and Ireland was not immune. Hindsight may regard it as unhealthy, largely because of the fate of that generation, but also ...”

“... for a response, but there was none. Carver’s British reception has taken a little time. The Robert Altman movie Short Cuts, of 1993, based on nine stories and a poem of Carver’s, helped to get him wider notice. Among the stories incorporated in the film were ‘A Small, Good Thing’ – the one about the bereaved couple and the exigent baker – and ...”

“... The emphasis being steadily on the Incarnation, the mortal nature of the child is always relevant. Robert Campin’s The Virgin and Child in an Interior, of about 1430, fills what may look to us like a simple idea with recondite symbolisms: even the position of the child’s left hand is important, for he touches his mother’s face with a conventional ...”

“... are of course novels about Jesus – in fact, Burgess wrote one of them, Man of Nazareth – and Robert Graves did Milton as well as Jesus and Claudius. Doubtless there are many more such biographical novels, forgotten or unread by me. They don’t seem very popular, though there was Lloyd Douglas’s bestselling The Robe, which amazed the experienced Edmund ...”

“... was getting started, to a Yorkshire collector, Henry Savile, and then to the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, whose books came mostly from the dissolution of the monasteries. The Cottonian library also contained the sole extant copy of Beowulf, which in 1731 narrowly escaped destruction in a serious fire. After a spell in the Bodleian the collection ...”

“... good or ill crops up again: the recumbent wife’s blue-cotton gloves, the allusion to dead uncle Robert, who once posthumously materialised in a bus queue at Hendon, and later in the winter garden. The winter garden of Russia is the scene of a good deal of materialisation. Ashburner loses his suitcase but it turns up, interfered with; Nina disappears more or ...”

“... in the title story of Nathan Englander’s collection What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank. Two Jewish couples drinking and smoking pot one afternoon in Florida call it ‘the Anne Frank game’. If a second Holocaust were to start up, which of their Gentile neighbours would give them a hiding place? Then they ...”