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“... in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by several serious poets (Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Ed Dorn are those who come to mind) – that the North American imagination is beginning to define its identity no longer on a West-East axis, across the Atlantic to ...”

“... some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the young Louis V in 987, the claims of his uncle, Charles of Lorraine, were contested by Hugh Capet, count of Paris.Hugh’s success owed much to the support of ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... primitive sources of poetry – the Eliot who once said that ‘Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle.’ It is good to learn from the recent engaging memoir by Hughes’s brother, Gerald, that the young boy had a tom-tom hidden in the local woods on which he would happily bash away. Eliot was giving the Charles Eliot Norton ...”

“... his essays would of course relax the link Johnson meant to tighten between faith and conduct. As Robert Voitle has suggested, Johnson was abundantly conscious of his responsibilities as a public instructor, and would have felt obliged to promote traditional doctrines. Johnson himself denounced teachers who betray weak minds into ‘doubts and distrust’, or ...”

“... in their immediate, literal forms that an education is being identified. Similarly Joyce’s savage parody in Ulysses of the Apostles’ Creed as it might unofficially sound for the English requires us only to remember the echo of what it’s not: They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a ...”

“... and shot by a firing squad, two at a time. There were five British victims: four Gibraltarians and Robert Boyd, a young Irish officer of the Bengal Army who’d put up most of the cash, hoping for a glamorous alternative to service in India as a grandee in Torrijos’s Spain. He was better treated, though, than Lorca would be. The Spanish government allowed ...”

“... to an occasional session of sweet silent thought, or even to the consulting of a concordance. Robert Browning, Luria, 1846 – I dedicate this last attempt for the present at Dramatic Poetry to a Great Dramatic Poet: ‘Wishing what I write may be read by his light’: if a phrase originally addressed, by not the least worthy of his contemporaries, to ...”

“... a more damaging charge – especially since it was linked to the somewhat improbable vision of Dr Robert Runcie, as a spider at the centre of a web of intrigue, still manipulating everything his own way. But the question, of course, is not whether what Dr Bennett wrote was wounding or damaging: it is whether or not it is true. Has the Church, in fact, in ...”

“... his nonsense about cannibals in Australia. In much the same class was his contemporary, A. Henry Savage Landor, grandson of the poet. As a boy he half-hanged himself, which, as Keay remarks, was excellent training for being towed by the throat behind Tibetan ponies. Worse things than that supposedly happened to him in the Himalayas, where he ‘took to heart ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... chancers from elsewhere in the Arab world arriving to offer their professional services. Munif’s savage and surreal satires of the suddenly rich royal family led to his Saudi nationality being revoked and to exile, first in Baghdad and then in Damascus. When he died in 2004, his widow rejected the posthumous honours (including loadsamoney) offered by Riyadh ...”

“... These are better exposed than by Dr Norman in the Venezuelan Carlos Rangel’s From the Noble Savage to the Noble Revolutionary (Del Buen Salvaje al Buen Revolucionario, Monte Avila, Caracas, 1976: there is a French edition, published by Robert Laffont). This is a book which deserves to be better known here, which ...”

“... a comment (an explanation, if there can ever be such a thing) he referred me to Alvarez and The Savage God. Reynolds was always the most interesting of the train robbers and in a way it’s a pity that it took him so long to write his version of the tale. He was the one who said ‘C’est la vie’ when finally arrested by Tommy Butler, the dogged old ...”

“... Not long ago I, too, was browsing in the Huntingdon files and found a large box of letters from Robert Conquest to Amis; the other side of the correspondence was missing, and what was there contained lots of limericks and few confessional items for the use of any future biographer of Conquest, possibly Salwak. It seemed somehow a slightly dingy way of ...”