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“... she lived in the age of ‘Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven’. I do not believe that the parallels Robert Wallace draws, in Jane Austen and Mozart (1983), between her fictional and his orchestral structures can be sustained in the detail Mr Wallace proposes, but he does indicate how small an opportunity Jane Austen had to know the composers Professor Halperin ...”

“... drawbridge and artificially-ruined keep – an enterprise vividly described not long ago in Robert Martin’s biography of the poet. Decades later, Charles’s nephew, the Poet Laureate, could pay no higher tribute to the late Prince Consort than by dedicating the first several Idylls of the King to his memory as ‘Scarce other than my king’s ideal ...”

“... Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed at. Boyle’s American ...”

“... contain huge leaps in time, which are intended to illustrate this. Her American readership is like Robert Frost’s: read by every American schoolchild, both have to be rescued from the flag-wavers with strenous reminders of their ‘dark’ seriousness and formal excellence. In Cather’s case, there is also the rich and bedeviling problem of how to frame her ...”

“... if I had body odour. According to my old Maudsley handbook Clozapine typically causes about two stone in weight gain. That is about what I put on. It also causes tachycardia and somnolence. Throughout the time I was taking it my pulse was often over a hundred at rest. I went to bed no later than 6.30 p.m. Clozapine can also cause pneumonia and in January ...”

“... to deal with a plague of poems modelled on that work, so that the mere occurrence of the words ‘stone’, ‘dust’ or ‘dry’ condemned them to the waste basket. Even among knowing readers the standing of Eliot as a poet was diminishing; the early novelty was gone. Ash Wednesday was too religious for many of them. Discussions of Eliot’s prose still ...”

“... best known architect and one of its greatest natural philosophers, experimented with everything: stone and wood, cones and domes, animals and men. He liked to depart from revered authorities. Under his hands plans for a church steeple or an academic hall would turn into a bold revision of Vitruvian schemes, the twitches of an anatomised dog into a startling ...”

“... a piece of double-entry book-keeping of the soul, or as a spiritual equivalent to the microscope Robert Hooke was using in the 1660s to count the hairs on a flea’s leg. What makes Pepys matter as a writer is the fact that he is a man totting up his sins before God, and a man out to take sexual favours and greedily sum them up, and a man who works ...”

“... where ‘the high pines bend/Seaward in slow acknowledgment of mountain wind’ and a ‘square stone’ table is ‘set with blue figs’. The poem was written in 1954, when Mathews and Saint Phalle were living in the coastal village of Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to ...”

“... Well, I could never write a verse, ­– could you?Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.Robert Browning, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’The world has an established place for poems about paintings – sometimes you wonder if there was ever a poet who didn’t write one – but, oddly, the poem-painting relationship doesn’t seem to be reversible ...”

“... urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 campaign to ‘liquidate Stone’ (the young historian Lawrence Stone), he composed what was later described as ‘one of the most vitriolic attacks ever made by one historian on another’. Victims constantly used the word ‘malicious’ about his ...”

“... that was it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I ...”

“... analysis of the hero: the camera would delve like a shovel or coax as a sculptor chips a block of stone to find the lurking image. He had been instructed in the value of deep focus by his cameraman, Gregg Toland, whose name he placed beside his own on the last card of the closing credits. Citizen Kane was talked of before it appeared, and admired by those who ...”

“... to revise and correct the pages. When he was released, Wilde gave the manuscript to his friend Robert Ross, who had two copies made. He sent one to Lord Alfred Douglas; the other he later lodged in the British Museum. Sections from Ross’s copy were published in 1905 and in 1908. The complete version, based on the original manuscript, wasn’t published ...”

“... This background gave Oliver something in common with other leading Parliamentarians, notably Robert and Henry Rich, the earls of Warwick and Holland, descendants of the iniquitous Sir Richard Rich. They were all of them ardent Puritans, but they were also hard-faced men whose forefathers had done well out of the dissolution of the monasteries. The ...”