“... group of teachers for him including, momentously, the composer Frank Bridge. Britten’s father, Robert, the dentist, is more mysterious. He was deeply unmusical; Basil Reeve and others thought that he had no faith in his son’s ability to make a musical career. But there is an intensely moving letter, written by ...”

“... or the panoply of libel threats used by press barons to silence speech they don’t care for. (Robert Maxwell hounded Private Eye for years in the libel courts, as did Tiny Rowland and, more recently, the Barclay Brothers, owners of the Telegraph.) Sometimes, too, self-conscious adherence to principle leads people to act as provocateurs, as in the ...”

“... Bagehot undoubtedly was, thoroughly, professionally and ancestrally: a banker. His grandfather Robert Bagehot was a West Country merchant who shipped goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s ...”

“... a very Parisian affair, but without any women – he’s introduced to its new director, Robert Rediger, who invites him to dinner. Rediger is a man of his times: a convert to Islam and an ally of Ben Abbes. (The name is a twist on Robert Redeker, a right-wing journalist who in 2006 went into hiding after receiving ...”

“... to solder their cause together with appeals to colour-blind communism and pan-Africanism. As Robert Vitalis notes in his book White World Order, Black Power Politics, Black Internationalism was born alongside the white chauvinist version of international relations at the end of the 19th century, when ‘international relations meant race ...”

“... 1945 – the Cold War standing in this case as both analogy and warning. In Return to Cold War, Robert Legvold – a specialist in post-Soviet foreign policy and regular contributor to Foreign Affairs – sees worrying similarities between the current situation and the early stages of the Cold War (c.1948-53), focusing in particular on the rhetorical ...”

“... while levying heavy tariffs to protect landowners’ profits. Liberals, and liberal Tories like Robert Peel, realised that slimming the state allowed them to defend it better against this radical critique. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Conservative political strategy of ‘austerity’ meant that Labour could be identified as irresponsible high ...”

“... the Atlantic seaboard’s pundits as much as it does the fine people defending the honour of Robert E. Lee. It remains to be seen whether America, Britain, Europe and liberalism can be made great again. But it already seems clear that the racial supremacist in the White House and many of his opponents are engaged in the same endeavour: to extend closing ...”

“... silver in the age of Web 2.0, Thomson has since added, is open to doubt. But that doesn’t stop Robert Gottlieb from presenting himself, at the start of his new biography, as an unapologetic negative theologian. ‘She’s still hiding – no one will ever know what was taking place behind those amazing eyes. Only the camera knew.’The story of Garbo’s ...”

“... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the ...”

“... encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet James Merrill and the British novelists Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, she fled town as soon as she could, muttering that she wasn’t made for this kind of thing. She seems to have cut a formidable figure. ‘Mary Renault arrived all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple ...”

“... will not help us to understand anything about the politics of émigré groups. Better to turn to Robert Johnston’s excellent New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles 1920-19451, which has languished in neglect, just possibly because it appeared from a Canadian university press. Both Johnston and ...”

“... the Church, his brother Jacques as an intermediary with the Army, and promoted another brother, Robert, to a leading foreign-trade position. Both Jacques and Robert went on to become enormously rich industrial magnates. In addition, Mitterrand appointed Jean-Christophe’s mother-in-law as a deputy Minister of ...”

“... commonly posed or faked, to its over-simplistic headlines and its unintentional absurdities. Robert Kee’s The World We Left Behind shows that one can make up an interesting and agreeable book almost solely from this source. It isn’t ‘social history’, since, as it moves from 1 January 1939 to 31 December, it is largely concerned with ...”

“... Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding ...”