“... whom he has not scrupled to exclude: ‘E.V. Lucas, Maurice Hewlett, “Alpha of the Plough”, Robert Lynd, Christopher Morley in America, and a hundred others.’ The Lucases and the Lynds, I remember, were still esteemed presences in or behind the book that I got as a school prize; and the anathema that has since been pronounced on them I hail as one ...”

“... range of flourishing Shakespeareans – from Stephen Greenblatt to Stanley Cavell, Lynda Boose to Robert Weimann – who are catalogued and castigated, chapter by chapter, under the usual demonised labels: as deconstructionists, New Historicists, psychoanalytic critics, feminists and Marxists (who share their section, less predictably, with Christians). Given ...”

“... a point. For instance, she privately draws doom-ridden conclusions from her supposed descent from Robert FitzRoy, who committed suicide, like his uncle Castlereagh, and like her father, who wasn’t married to her mother, but left her his name – which he didn’t spell in the supposedly ancestral fashion with a capital in the middle. That spelling Charlotte ...”

“... The high noon of imperial expansion towards the end of the 19th century produced an archetypal tale. Kipling’s version of it is ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, which like all Kipling’s early tales made a great impression on Jack London. His own version, ‘An Odyssey of the North’, concerns an Aleutian Indian whose betrothed is stolen from him by a Norwegian seal poacher, a giant with a golden mane and the blood of the Vikings, much the same as the hero of Kipling’s story, and also of Rider Haggard’s romances ...”

“... 1950 with the Attlee government’s rejection of the plan devised by Jean Monnet and proposed by Robert Schuman for the pooling of coal and steel production. Many years later Dean Acheson, Secretary of State at the time, was to call it ‘the great mistake of the post-war period’ from which both Britain and Europe continued to suffer. The Foreign Office ...”

“... English; that if they could, they wouldn’t; that a book would be judged by its cover. My copy of Robert Lacey’s monumental work The Kingdom travelled safely inside the dust-jacket of Vincent Cronin’s Louis and Antoinette. Perhaps it was not the wisest choice, since Saudi Arabia has a few things in common with the Ancien Régime: but I was confident that ...”

“... are accommodated in larger designs. A text that illustrates this with paradigmatic elegance is Robert Graves’s poem ‘Warning to Children’ – not included in Spufford’s collection. But then which of us in his right mind or with money in her purse is going to worry about the theoretical considerations motivating the presentation of this amiable ...”

“... of Animal Farm have been published. That is probably not quite up to date. In a Soviet Union where Robert Conquest was fêted on a recent visit, and his The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow are being serialised, there is not likely to be any flinching at Orwell. The Orwell industry, then, shows no sign of decline, in part because of his political ...”

“... security agencies that had earlier shunned him: the FBI, NSA and the CIA. He meets and talks with Robert Morris, the NSA’s computer security guru and, incidentally, father of the Cornell graduate student-hacker whose 1988 worm virus devastated computers all over the United States. As a result of his experience, he says, Stoll became ‘pro-active – almost ...”

“... Washington the day before Martin Luther King was shot, and arrived in Los Angeles a week after Robert Kennedy’s assassination.’ In spite of these omissions, Sara Maitland has found in her own fiction ‘a pride in the Sixties’, a regret for ‘a period that was culturally significant, an explosion of energy’, which she contrasts with the shameful ...”

“... springs a surprise: the individual most responsible for Britain’s current plight is Sir Robert Peel. The repeal of the Corn Laws defused the revolutionary potential of the working class and gave it an interest in the preservation of empire. Peel’s ‘historic compromise’ thus led to the dominant role of ‘finance capital’ and, in due ...”

“... these generalities. It includes Classical buildings – Quinlan Terry’s Richmond scheme and Robert Adam’s computer centre at Dogmersfield Park in Hampshire – as well as jokier numbers – Terry Farrell’s boathouse at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s ...”

“... greasy till’. Was it For this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? ‘Delirium’ suggests Yeats’s usual equivocal insight; but more magnificently it celebrates the fever in the blood which was about to quicken the national pulses yet again. ‘Romantic ...”

“... When Thatcherism becomes a ‘wasm’, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means nothing, although there are probably one or two European politicians who think it has something to do with being rude to foreigners at conferences. True, in some other countries, but not in Germany or Japan, or not for long, New Right ideology has been translated into policy: but no one calls it Thatcherism ...”

“... caps picked up on the Lodi battlefield, and held to the uppers by bits of string. Lieutenant Robert, the young conscript who is for the moment the author’s other self, and who will make a cursory appearance later in the novel as an Italian Count, is formally invited to dinner by the Marchese on whom he is billeted; and he is more preoccupied with ...”