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“... Barthes’s Mythologies, brilliantly expanded by off-beat, speculative historical adventurers like Robert Darnton, and narrowed by most contemporary researchers to the study of products of mass consumption. Foucault obscurely meditated about authority or confinement or sex; Erica Rand can make equally weighty points with the aid of Ken’s crotch. Part of a ...”

“... lifelong penchant for disguise. We are told that he was obsessed with certain books by Robert Louis Stevenson, but no convincing explanations are offered. Why was he so eager to adapt The Suicide Club, Stevenson’s strange tale of a group of men who agree to act as each other’s executioners? Willetts doesn’t tell us. Edward Hyde, a sinister ...”

“... two extra hours of Downton-free life. This latest crop of period narratives probably began with Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park (2001): at best, a mildly amusing self-conscious pastiche, though it wasn’t clear why a film-maker who could produce Nashville and Short Cuts would bother. The writer credited with Gosford Park was the now ennobled Julian ...”

“... etc) carry through to inequalities of income after tax and benefits. In practice, it’s hard to alter this through redistribution alone: the key is to change the way the rewards of economic success are distributed in the first place. The last Labour government succeeded in keeping inequality in check. But it didn’t reduce it. If you don’t change the ...”

“... The story may then become so complicated that even reasonably sober academic biographers have to alter the whole shape of the early career to accommodate their guesses. When the fiction is provided by someone whose business is precisely the writing of fiction the invention may be far less cautious. The Burgess version did not please the most eminent of ...”

“... or requests had to be written or typed on the correct blank form.In Good-Bye to All That (1929), Robert Graves complained about the ‘army forms marked “Urgent”’ which ‘constantly arrived from headquarters’ and were ‘all contradictory’. These forms were prefixed ‘AF’ and indexed with a number and a ‘class’ letter, which in 1917 ran ...”

“... such changes when the playwright is dead. John Osborne and Peter Nichols did not want Miller to alter their plays, but he was more fortunate when he directed Robert Lowell’s version of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Since Miller did not want to set this play in the Caucasus, with an actor tied to a rock, he ...”

“... quantity has found its way to the West to merit a compact but lavishly illustrated history from Robert Fisher, a grasp of the current situation needs more explicit testimony than even these powerful images provide. It is obvious from Warren Smith’s marathon retelling of the tangled tale of Tibet and its longstanding relationship with China that things may ...”

“... artist, to develop rather than possess innately). While Schuyler and his circle tolerated Auden, Robert Lowell and his reputation gave them fits. Schuyler would define his poetic project, at least in part, by opposing it to that of Lowell and the other gloomy campus darlings of the New Critics: New York poets, except I suppose the colour-blind, are affected ...”

“... of numbers could not be taken for granted. With his popular textbook The Grounde of Artes (1543), Robert Recorde made a polemical claim for arithmetic as the foundation of all human knowledge. ‘Without nomberynge a man can do almost nothynge,’ he wrote, but ‘with the helpe of it, you maye attayne to all thyng.’ In many respects, what Otis describes ...”

“... has exposed the militarisation of a wing of the American Right, and could perhaps permanently alter the locus of the national debate. It has also made 19 April into a date of cultish significance. It was on 19 April 1992 that a supremacist guerrilla named Randy Weaver saw his wife and child shot dead during a shootout with Federal agents in Idaho. On 19 ...”

“... too, in Jacques le Fataliste, has no inhibitions about buttonholing his reader and threatening to alter the story if there are too many interruptions. It would perhaps be more accurate to describe this kind of fiction as Brechtian, in the sense that the author goes out of his way to emphasise that he is not some kind of tape-recorder but a man with a pan to ...”

“... that America specialises in conferring now and then on a writer. The novels featuring Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman (a decidedly unsweet fellow despite his name), make mordant and painful comedy out of the experience of literary fame. Zuckerman’s scandalous novel Carnovsky, which like its model Portnoy’s Complaint has broken the literary ...”

“... voluptuous rebirth.’ There aren’t many skeletons left in Hardwick’s closet. Since 1973, when Robert Lowell published The Dolphin, a series of sonnets based on Hardwick’s letters to him during the breakdown of their marriage, the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first ...”

“... disruption (c.1996) or epigenetics (c.2008), both of which elucidate how toxic chemicals can alter DNA activity even in the absence of mutations or other genetic injury. When she was drafting her chapters, it was not yet accepted toxicological wisdom that the timing of exposure matters, with exposures during pregnancy, infancy and early childhood ...”