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“... religion. The reason for its recent resurrection by libertarians of the New Right, and especially Robert Nozick, is not far to seek. We have strong moral intuitions about the importance of bodily integrity: rape and torture are perhaps the worst evils that humans can experience. These intuitions can be framed in the language of self-ownership: it is because ...”

“... saw too many difficulties. A new university ‘would necessarily be “a very poor affair”, as Robert Birley, the British Educational Adviser, sniffed’. Along with academic snobbery went ‘an acid tinge of anti-American feeling’: the brash Allies were making a vulgar bid for popularity, and so on. They even had the effrontery to appoint an American ...”

“... She managed to get herself engaged to two gentiles, provocatively changed her name from Levin to Robert (thus adopting the family name her younger brother Ludwig had taken upon his conversion), and finally chose for her husband the much younger minor diplomat and liberal journalist Karl Varnhagen von Ense. The salon she had led from her home before her ...”

“... implications of the planters’ feelings of guilt. Writing to a British merchant in 1721, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall lamented to his correspondent that both of them were ‘muckworms – that is, in other words, too great lovers of this world’. Were they less attached to it, he added, the ‘thoughts of having a little more white and yellow earth ...”

“... During my solitary evenings I have been reading the two volumes of Thomas Hardy’s biography by Robert Gittings. I have just finished it and this recalls to me Hardy’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, which I actually attended. Or rather the funeral of most of him: his heart had been left behind in Dorsetshire. I suppose I was one of the ...”

“... I remember saying to my pupil Miss Schloss: ‘Miss Schloss, I suggest you might read the poems of Robert Frost.’ Miss Schloss drew herself up and said in a piercingly reproachful voice: ‘I don’t read, I write, Mr Spender.’ I nearly ruined the afternoon of one of my poet colleagues by mentioning the name of one of his contemporaries (a charming ...”

“... Generationalism’, as Mr Wohl designates the practice of thinking about history and society in terms of the characteristics attributed, usually by themselves, to members of particular age-groups, is a conceptual device nobody seems to have studied very closely till the 19th century. Not, of course, that conflicts between youth and age hadn’t been noticed: ‘they hate us youth,’ as Falstaff remarked, thinking of his behaviour rather than his age ...”

“... heavily at lunchtime and fell asleep during afternoon meetings; he liked to play with guns; after Robert Kennedy ordered a halt to all operations against Cuba during the missile crisis Harvey sent in teams of agents; once in an office discussion he pulled a 45, pointed it at someone who disagreed with him, and released the safety catch. This nutcase held ...”

“... delicate passages: as with Mayakovsky, they are mostly about animals. In a poem called ‘Lines to Robert Lowell’, for instance, there are these lines on Arthur Miller’s dog Hugo: You’re not a dachshund, you’re a slipper, a moccasin with a gaping sole, shabby with use. A certain Unknown Being puts you on his left foot and shuffles across the ...”

“... the (in Eton lingo) ‘head man’. Although he’d been a pre-war headmaster of Charterhouse, Robert Birley was not really a school-master. He arrived from the post of Head of the Allied Education Control Commission in Germany, a towering figure, and a man of magnetic personality. I got to know him well from the start, as I used to take round many of his ...”

“... like brothers, and families which stoically accept their lot, and find their truth in Robert Westall’s novels of the Second World War. Alison Lurie, claiming that the best children’s books are ‘on the subversive side’, has said that ‘most of the lasting works of juvenile literature express feelings not generally approved of or even ...”

“... from the Orgy Room. Irwin Gance, another habitué of the Room, is hired by the minister in charge, Robert Loyd, to ‘rationalise’ BHM’s personnel, in return for financial contributions to his leadership bid. Loyd shows signs of being unstoppable. His retainers are particularly fiercesome. Geraldine, who recalls a famous member of Harold Wilson’s ...”

“... rope and the rod. It will be some time before we can read a blow-by-blow description of how Sir Robert Armstrong got the better of Mrs Thatcher’s advisers in Downing Street – former academics with bees in their bonnets who saw their task as that of hastening the coming of the counter-revolution. For those of us who can bear to wait, there are treats in ...”

“... 22/1 BC) belong to the correspondence of two army trumpeters. But on 11 March 1978 the excavator, Robert Anderson, found himself looking at something quite different: five tattered scraps, with elegant Latin capitals. Individual words stood out: CAESAR was interesting. LYCOAL was sensational. Only one Lycoris occurs in Latin literature: she was the ...”

“... of the Mississippi delegation. An enraged President immediately gets on the phone to ol’ buddy Robert Kintner, head of the National Broadcasting Company: ‘Get those god-damned cameras off those niggers! Get them off right now!’ Still more numerous are little scenes intended to give us a whiff of the sweet smell of success and the sourness of failure ...”