“... other but with all of it ultimately deadening. The story appeared in 1960 in Kenyon Review, where Robert Lowell would very likely have seen it, and where he would, I suspect, have found the penultimate line of his poem ‘The Flaw’, addressed to a woman lying beside him: ‘Dear Figure curving like a question mark’. Callisto’s girlfriend ‘lay like a ...”

“... Robert​ Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere ...”

“... from Westminster and returned to Scotland by a young nationalist writer and singer called Ian Hamilton. Another opportunity arose not long afterwards, when the Post Office announced that the logogram EIIR would in future appear on all postboxes. Henderson was at a meeting held in Sorley MacLean’s flat to discuss how Scotland might respond. He and Bobby ...”

“... and ‘absurd’ entered into common usage. One of Jeremy’s heroes was the war photographer Robert Capa, who had been blown up by a mine in Indochina in 1954 at the age of 41. The ideal life, we often joked, would have been to have spent the Twenties drinking with Fitzgerald and then been killed in Spain alongside John Cornford and Julian Bell. Jeremy ...”

“... for the founders of American neoconservatism, the Yale classicist Donald Kagan and his sons Robert and Frederick, both of whom were influential in promoting the second Iraq War. And yet for the Founding Fathers of the United States, Hamilton and Madison in particular, Pericles was a warmongering imperialist who ...”

“... that Rochester had no objection to collaboration because he contributed a scene to a play by Sir Robert Howard, a scene which, if the play had ever been finished or played, would almost certainly not have been acknowledged, and he put more effort into a collaboration with the long-dead poet John Fletcher than into anything else he ever did. In ‘Lucina’s ...”

“... Treatise of Government is ‘slavery’, a fate to which Locke thought the political theory of Sir Robert Filmer condemned everyone except monarchs. Still, Machiavelli’s influence on the American revolutionaries is plain. His description in the Discourses, memorable in the way of oxymorons, of the way the tribunate made the Roman republic ‘more ...”

“... of the common good and the unselfishness and ability to administer it’. An Eton teacher, ‘Red Robert’ Birley, had encouraged him to read the Marxist economist Harold Laski and to visit the school’s ‘mission’ in London’s East End, which David had found ‘very useful as it gives me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with members of the middle ...”

“... us when we were lost. A small image has remained with me: debris over the grave of Alexander Hamilton, the great champion of New York, in the old cemetery of Trinity Church near the WTC. While Thomas Jefferson waxed pastoral about an agrarian America, Hamilton insisted on the cosmopolitanism of the city as the ...”

“... he was older, he took snapshots of ordinary things and put them in albums (‘Pair of pants – Hamilton, Montana – 1916’). He also became an obsessive drawer of maps, suggesting both a love of order and a fascination with the idea of magically containing the vastness of the world within a formal outline; he liked to repeat things. What is certain is ...”

“... Rocks & Mountains’, found in a manuscript collection of settings by the Jacobean lutenist Robert Johnson (who is not to be confused with the Tudor church musician of that name, or indeed with the great Delta blues singer of the 1930s). Johnson is known to have composed music for King’s Men productions, and his beautiful settings of Ariel’s songs ...”

“... probably procure the manuscript somewhere, some time,’ he writes airily to an editor at Hamish Hamilton who has inquired about the novel. ‘But I cannot guarantee this of course. Do not tell anyone else about it at the moment, except Mark [Bonham Carter], of course.’ He adds that he hasn’t read the manuscript, so is unable to say whether it’s a work ...”

“... out with a fresh vigour and shot through with a lot of new ideas.Bryan Ferry was taught by Richard Hamilton, whose mentor was Marcel Duchamp. Pop art took the capital of popular culture and reinvested it; pop culture took Pop art as its exemplar and reapplied it: a marvellous feedback loop. ‘Virginia Plain’ was based on one of Ferry’s own ...”

“... bookshops burst, the coffee-tables groan – may be less than obvious. The anthropologist Annette Hamilton, reviewing Australians to 1788, judges that excellent volume disappointing, not so much in what it says and shows of precontact Aboriginality, but in the limitation of its address to readers who are already culturally privileged. The work, she said, is ...”

“... a stairway to heaven. The steps, coincidentally, chime in with a poem by the recently dead Ian Hamilton printed in the LRB. We are on a kind of stair. The world below Will never be regained; was never there Perhaps. And yet it seems We’ve climbed to where we are With diligence, as if told long ago How high the highest rung. 23 January. To Sotheby’s ...”