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“... as a ‘magazine of wisdom’, as Gladstone put it. They are not Burke. One of the strengths of Nicholas Robinson’s highly original and attractive survey is that it conveys the controversial, fallible man rather than the icon, the way that Burke struck irreverent observers in his own time, over time. The British Museum possesses 293 satires of Burke ...”

“... John Charles Robinson​ , perhaps the greatest connoisseur Britain has ever known, was turned down on four occasions for the post of director of the National Gallery. He was thought to be too closely associated with the trade (‘little better than a dealer’), and was known to have operated with scant respect for officialdom when employed by the South Kensington museum ...”

“... the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or indeed any ...”

“... had been founded as a haven by and for outsiders. In 1917 the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, dismissed several professors for protesting against America’s entry into World War One. This precipitated the resignations of two leading historians, Charles Beard and James Robinson, both of whom had ...”

“... imposing a government task force. Not everyone in the new Government was happy, however. Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General, was obliged to resign when it was revealed that Peter Mandelson had borrowed around £400,000 from him to buy a house in Notting Hill. Robinson stayed out in the cold while Mandelson, the man ...”

“... a particularly vitriolic review in the Sunday Tribune by one Martin Mansergh. Mansergh’s father, Nicholas, is the distinguished Cambridge historian, and Mansergh fils (a Protestant) is Head of Research in the opposition Fianna Fail party. ‘Research’ is Fianna Fail code for ‘Northern Ireland’, and English readers will get some idea of Mansergh’s ...”

“... if he painted at night it would be with the erratic assistance of a hurricane lamp ... like Robinson Crusoe he could report that he had “managed to achieve almost complete solitude”.’ Fairweather is easy to mythologise, particularly if you envy the lifestyle. Bail peers through a connoisseur’s magnifying-glass – with a sensuous, sharp ...”

“... to establish a collection of historic Venetian glass on Murano; and above all when John Charles Robinson bought ceramics, metalwork, glass and textiles from Venice for South Kensington, the ‘products of the artisan’ were receiving plenty of ‘serious scholarly attention’. As for the ‘full social and historical context’, that was surely what ...”

“... marginalised. A new study was needed, consolidating and reviewing the evidence, and this is what Nicholas Roe offers. He claims no startling discoveries, but he brings together in one place much scattered information and a few new details from Godwin’s papers. His treatment of the tradition of Dissent in Cambridge fills out what Schneider, Chard and others ...”

“... and periodically subject to extreme physical abuse, the Marlowe of the novels, unlike Edward G. Robinson’s insurance investigator in Double Indemnity, is trapped in the dark underside of American life and never acquires the insurance man’s protective armour, his forceful, single-minded menace. But whereas in Woman in the Window Lang directed ...”

“... basically a book about an undersea chase of the sort that occurs in the books of C.S. Forester or Nicholas Monsarrat: Red Storm Rising is about the Third World War. Not that the theme is in itself a novelty in best-seller-land. Indeed, novels about the Third World War began to appear only a few years after the second one had ended. Reread thirty or ...”

“... to; and a cat and her various kittens. In Germany and Austria, The Wall is routinely compared to Robinson Crusoe, but it’s more like Walden in a parallel universe (Walled-in), a shepherd’s calendar and primer in subsistence living for a disturbingly altered world. It’s a novel that contrives to be, by turns, utopian and dystopian, an idyll and a ...”

“... Bower has concentrated his efforts on Robert Maxwell and (the intimately connected) Geoffrey Robinson, many more are encompassed by the allegations he raises – it is not just a matter of Peter Mandelson but of Bernard Donoghue, Gordon Brown, Helen Liddell, Alistair Campbell and Charlie Whelan. Stephen Byers and ...”

“... Cunningham’s hands, less so in a Guardian report, ‘The Beowulf at Oxford’s door’, in which Nicholas de Jongh presented the Oxford Medievalists as a force of reaction, Cunningham’s proposal as ‘the spirit of revolt’: ‘his attack is nothing less than the raising of a revolutionary call,’ ‘Professor Norman [sic] Godden, the new Rawlinson and ...”

“... the young, or the literate classes, or – extraordinarily – the Roman Catholic Church. Thomas Robinson, a lapsed friar, in a pamphlet published in 1622 called The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, described the comfortable life of a father confessor to the nuns there: ‘Then after supper it is usual for him to read a little of Venus and ...”