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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ‘superimposed another level of translation by setting it in a 17th-century limbo. Lowell was pleased to ...”

“... Tantalisingly, the discussions of Scott’s individual works seldom engage with either art or craft. Nor are his millions of readers considered anything but proof of stooping to get them. Yet Sutherland does take three general themes seriously: Scott’s professionalism, his nationalism and his social climbing. The first two in particular help to bond ...”

“... of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor spent the last 12 years of her life, raising peacocks and writing ferocious stories populated by ...”

“... by more than half the 35 contributors, few of whom bother to make it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy ...”

“... the decent operatives within the intelligence agencies – though, given the requirements of their craft, they are harder to find. Hersh’s work is especially important to remember in the contemporary political climate, when the CIA and FBI have acquired extraordinary – perhaps unprecedented – legitimacy among people who think of themselves as liberals or ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... and has defined his political ideal in ‘a celebrated study of the Utopian Socialists from Robert Owen to William Morris’. Marquis is also, it emerges, a dirty-minded lecher who betrays his disciple Richard sexually and intellectually before being carried off raving to the lunatic asylum. He returns at the end of the novel to lead the fight against ...”

“... unself-conscious or natural. Even when male literary theorists (such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton) have taken an interest in feminist criticism, they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ...”

“... conformity. But the specialism must be transmitted from generation to generation: if an expert’s craft dies with him, it is not an ideal Way. In the country where ‘a nail that shines will get knocked down,’ too much creativity or innovative talent tends to be frowned on and mistrusted. An expert or a teacher in any field is invariably called sensei (one ...”

“... the west coast of North America to Europe or Asia. ‘But coming from Asia is easier.’ In 1889 Robert Louis Stevenson, in the final chapter of a wandering life, settled on a hillside above Apia, the Samoan capital. He bought three hundred acres of jungle, and built a two-storey timber house. He was 39 and accompanied by his American wife, Fanny, her two ...”

“... authentic. What is most impressive about Ashbery’s poems is their tactile urbanity, the spruce craft of their diction, which, like James’s prose, becomes more enjoyable and revealing, in and for itself, each time one makes one’s way through it. Moreover, a typically modern kind of intimacy grows out of the very absence of what one conventionally ...”

“... market’. In a startling unpublished passage from the journals quoted by Rose, she defended the craft of True Confessions writing: ‘It takes a good tight plot and a slick ease that are not picked up overnight like a cheap whore.’ To American ears, the word has at least some echoes of urbanity and sophistication, as in ‘the city slicker’. But to her ...”

“... the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have taken a terrible revenge for the defeat of his faithful general, but troubles detained him elsewhere; and so the myth of Mongol supremacy vanished from a ...”

“... cultural enlightenment. ‘At its heart is the conceptual transformation of painting from a manual craft to a liberal art.’ Painting became a liberal art, one might say, because it became associated with a form of liberal critical discourse. Paintings were understood not merely as objects of aesthetic beauty, but as bearers of meanings which it required a ...”