“... 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 ...”

“... Huichol economy. But they bear little resemblance to the traditional works from which they derive. Robert Zingg, the anthropologist who introduced Huichol art to the West in the 1930s, collected not yarn paintings but gourd and clay bowls, decorated with patterns in subdued earth tones and designed to be left as votive objects in sacred spots. Creating such ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of sexual practices’ – as if revelations of Scott Fitzgerald’s alcoholic excesses, Robert Frost’s nastiness and pettiness, Philip Larkin’s racism, or Roald Dahl’s arrogance had not tempered readers’ adulation. While she herself has written a biography of John Dos Passos as well as books on Ellen Glasgow, Plath and Stein, Wagner-Martin ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... does not seem to have been told that it was dangerous to fly through the cloud. (I recommend Robert Milliken’s No Conceivable Injury: The Story of Britain and Australia’s Nuclear Cover-Up, 1986.) The chief omission in the book concerns plutonium. Though we are told in great detail how the nuclear device was made and fired, we learn next to nothing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is a pity that in 1987 Wintour allowed himself to be inveigled into resuming hostilities through Robert Maxwell’s forlorn London Daily News.) The return of Max Hastings to the paper on which he made his name – first as a rumbustious editor of the Londoner’s Diary from 1975 to 1976 and then as the insouciant liberator of Port Stanley in 1982 – has at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Japanese ancestry’ who suffered in the war; the University’s president, Robert Coogan, declared that the memorial’s purpose was ‘to acknowledge the past, honour those our nation wronged, and rededicate ourselves to a future in which such things will never – never – be repeated’. What happened has been addressed before in ...”

“... copies of Peruvian nuns’ habits, or whatever. A great deal of Westwood’s work brings to mind Robert Frost’s remark about ‘playing tennis with the net down’. Which is to say, if you choose, as Westwood has done for much of her career, to ignore commercial imperatives, then creating innovative fashion – exploring the ‘aesthetic effect of a ...”

“... advertising copywriter), were it not for the participation of the historians Yehoshua Porath and Robert Wistrich, and, most surprisingly, the civil rights activist and professor of law Ruth Gavison. One of Gavison’s two essays proposes introducing an American-style constitution; the other reassesses the legitimacy of the Jewish state, which she now ...”