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“... As we wait​ with bated breath for Prince Harry’s memoirs, we might take a moment to consider the royal adverbs. In the days of Lilibet I, the favourites were, in no particular order, ‘jollily’, ‘spiffingly’, ‘thrillingly’ and ‘boringly’. It’s not yet clear how involved Lilibet II will be in palace matters but, under the influence of her mother and her yoga instructor, the preferred adverbs are likely to be ‘honestly’, ‘amazingly’, ‘insanely’ and ‘unbelievably ...”

“... Carpenter, predictably, finds the three essayists – Richard Humphreys, John Alexander and Peter Robinson – ‘taking a rather solemn approach to the whole thing’; whereas, he assures us, Pound’s exertions on behalf of these arts partook ‘more than a little of the amiable joke’. Before it is through, Pound’s centenary year will bring on ...”

“... Iris Robinson is, at the time of writing, under acute psychiatric care in a Belfast hospital, after a BBC Northern Ireland documentary revealed that she had, at the age of 59, solicited £50,000 from two property developers to help fund a business run by her 19-year-old lover, Kirk McCambley. She has some experience of the mental health profession ...”

“... as primitive (as I believe on other grounds it is) because it ‘appeals especially to the modern Christian humanist’ in that it contains no miracles (since it is a manual of early church discipline, that is hardly surprising). And his methods of excising from all the Gospel accounts and from 1 Corinthians the, to him, offending identification by Jesus at ...”

“... Either way it put me in mind of a passage early in Donald Antrim’s first novel, Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World: I keep seeing Jim’s face, lit red by tail lights, in the long moments before the lines snapped taut, while Bill Nixon tried and retried to start his fume-spewing, out-of-tune Celica. It was all so profoundly uncomfortable; there ...”

“... folklore, flora and fauna, is the book’s subject, it is oddly elusive. Despite the fact that Tim Robinson’s account is the story of a pilgrimage, exhaustively detailed and loyal to every intimation, there is no ultimate moment or place of devotion. The quest is an end in itself, and it is not perhaps a quest for Aran but a quest to which Aran gives shape ...”

“... We owe a large debt to the famous chapter on Robinson Crusoe in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Watt really made us use our wits about that novel and forced us to relate it to our most serious interests. Reread after twenty years, moreover, the chapter still has all of its intellectual impact and verve. The trouble is, I now find myself wanting to quarrel with almost every sentence in it ...”

“... for an unwieldy and dangerous entity created from ill-assorted bits and pieces. As Charles Robinson notes in his new edition of the novel, such confusion set in soon after the book’s first publication in 1818. In October 1823, at a masked ball in Liverpool, a local newspaper reported: ‘Mr Harris, of Preston, personated (we are ...”

“... for their art in Eliot declaring ‘I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion’ and Marilynne Robinson ‘I am a mainline Protestant, a.k.a. a liberal Protestant’? In When I Was a Child I Read Books, her most recent collection of essays, Robinson wrote: ‘Relevance was precisely not an issue for me. I looked to ...”

“... that fable in his second volume inevitably attaches a disabling reminder of the Dunciad to Peter Robinson and his assembled chorus of scholars. There is something cosy and desperate in their yawping enterprise. It could be that Ricks, in his essay ‘Tenebrae and At-One-Ment’, is deliberately baiting ‘the current scientism and theoreticity’, but his ...”

“... do better to read the summary expertly given in The Rosetta Stone, or, best of all, in Andrew Robinson’s lucid and well illustrated chapter on hieroglyphics in Lost Languages (whose many line drawings are at once valuable and deceptive, since they make the signs displayed look a great deal easier to identify than they are in the worn and weathered ...”

“... rhyme convey the frailty of the victim, the desolate sense of waste. A recurrent persona in Kid is Robinson, partly an alter ego of the poet: ‘we went back years, me and that man Robinson, / the illiterate son of a Maltese policeman.’ He is a seedy, odoriferous, mean fellow, a Sweeney without the massive hams, the brute ...”

“... of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought.’ For David Robinson, writing in the Twenties and reprinted in the Sixties, the ‘perfection’ of Sappho’s verse was clear enough proof of her unblemished character. He was perhaps unusual in his unshakable confidence that (at least in the case of female writers) fine ...”

“... in in this book than the term ‘irenic’. She is less interested in Machiavellian deceit than in Christian principles, and devotes less space to the elucidation of Defoe’s fictional strategies than to the assertion of his homiletic strengths. Thus she considers The Family Instructor as one of Defoe’s ‘best works’, a volume of practical divinity whose ...”

“... turn out to live in a rural corner of Ontario between Toronto and Lake Huron, and to be white, Christian, prudish and dangling on a class rung somewhere between genteel poverty and middle-class comfort. Occasionally they move to the vicinity of Vancouver, only to go back to Ontario again. If this patch of the North Country sounds like a provincial ...”