“... 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 ...”

“... by the Liberals in 1886 and 1916, and by Labour in 1931. What happened in 1846 was that Sir Robert Peel’s government failed to carry its own backbenchers with it over the repeal of the Corn Laws. Though the Tory MPs who voted for protection were a majority in the Party, the Free Traders had a clear majority in the House of Commons as a whole, since ...”

“... peers. ‘He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this,’ Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos project, wrote to a colleague. Another eminent elder physicist, Eugene Wigner, described him as ‘a second Dirac, only this time human’. The rest of Feynman’s career was spent in academic physics, first at ...”

“... the castle) and a Princes Street (with no prince); even in the 1960s, the statue of Robert Burns in the middle of the main street was surrounded by Highland dancers every Friday night. The Scottishness of Mackay’s Dunedin is more a matter of moral style than of civic life, and her New Zealand a place of lush temptations and hazards – of ...”

“... biographies have been written in that manner: I would cite Enoch Powell’s Joseph Chamberlain and Robert Blake’s Disraeli – two other Tory heroes who incidentally, or not so incidentally, turned out to be rogues, Disraeli a most engaging one and Chamberlain the opposite. Powell’s experience with Chamberlain led him to remark on the tragedy of all ...”

“... earlier than his, Clarence is undergoing a painful loss of faith, brought on by reading Robert Ingersoll’s Some Mistakes of Moses and other scornful and persuasive incitements to infidelity. His life is ruined, and Updike tells us, with characteristic thoroughness, why this was so and what it felt like. ‘Life’s sounds all rang with a curious ...”

“... reappears transformed. The nudes who cavort in the black water and dance in the deep-violet sky in Robert Huskisson’s Come unto These Yellow Sands are among the most exquisite and sensuous in British art, combining the vitality of Fuseli’s libidinous acrobats with the pearly translucence and sheen of William Etty’s bottom-heavy models. Mid-19th-century ...”

“... novel. Clarke wrote about the penal settlements, more recently and more harshly described by Robert Hughes. While Carey’s hero was held in such places he was flogged with unforgettable violence, his back permanently scarred and furrowed, and two of his fingers severed. (There was a specially destructive New South Wales double ‘cat’.) Having made ...”

“... just been a nuisance to him. However, in 1932, he got to know the young, beautiful and dotty Robert Heber Percy, otherwise known as ‘the Mad Boy’, for whom he fell and who became a fixture in his household, eventually inheriting Berners’s estate. ‘No one,’ Mark Amory writes, ‘could liberate Berners himself at this stage, but Heber Percy ...”