“... insists on the laws of make-believe, on the fictionality of fiction, on its intertextuality, its self-referential ploys, on all the games and gimmicks taken so seriously by university wits. Davies takes them playfully, and indeed with dazzling skill, but his playfulness somewhat coldly deconstructs those notions to which sentimental old-timers (ARRO ...”

“... having one-fourth or more Indian blood’.) In his Destruction of the Californian Indians Robert Heizer reckons that between 1850 and 1863 some ten thousand Indians were indentured (made slaves, that is) or sold. In 1971 Heizer and Alan Almquist published three pages of Slave records from the Eureka courthouse in Humboldt county, Northern ...”

“... flamboyant John Elliotson’, ‘the one-eyed, gold-waistcoated, civic-skewering Robert Knox’, ‘the humane mad-doctor John Conolly’, ‘the bombastic Ernst Haeckel’. If Desmond gave us time to think about it, one might wonder whether ‘civic-skewering’ is a branch of anatomy (Knox was Burke and Hare’s main customer) or of social ...”

“... Recent years have also seen two outstanding single-country studies of the 19th-century duel: Robert Nye’s Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France nicely complements Ute Frevert’s Ehrenmänner (‘Men of Honour’) of 1991, a book that is close in subject-matter – although not in interpretation – to the one reviewed here. The duel ...”

“... the Frankfurt refugees retreated into ‘deeper isolation’; they suffered from ‘intellectual self-doubt, escapism and élitism’. ‘A lack of interest on the part of the Institute’s core group in becoming integrated’ explains their ‘shattered lives’, writes Krohn, alluding to the subtitle of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Even The Authoritarian ...”

“... Convention of 1907. Francis Younghusband was more or less born into the Great Game. His uncle was Robert Shaw, British Political Agent in Yarkand; his father was John Younghusband, Inspector-General of Police in the Punjab, and occasional lecturer on the Russian menace. At school at Clifton, his great friend was Henry Newbolt (‘The sand of the desert is ...”

“... of a long sequence of visitors, seeking some authenticity or purity not to be found elsewhere. Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran (1932) was a ‘decisive moment in the formulation of the Aran myth’, and the writings of Aran natives like Liam O’Flaherty and the Irish-language poet, the late Mairtin O’Diereain, have added further nuances and ...”

“... cultivating men of letters, he met and greatly irritated Siegfried Sassoon and Wilde’s friend Robert Ross. On Armistice Day he was to be seen in a tail-coat in a Rolls-Royce belonging to an epicene Chilean opium addict, a pretty example of feasting with panthers. Six years of dangerous living in the theatre were capped by the succès de scandale of The ...”

“... these Protestant politicians, including Walsingham and the Queen’s favourite of favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, pulled off a small victory on the domestic front. They took the Queen off to East Anglia on a progress, where they stage-managed a local political revolution which threw out of office the leading Catholics of the region and ...”

“... and with the sharpest eye in the business for the tricks of the capitalists. The publication of Robert Gildea’s recent book, which successfully weaves the strands of scientific, cultural and economic developments into a political and military narrative, and of Gerald Newman’s unfamiliar case for the growth of an English nationalist culture from ...”

“... of voice.’ That gives the clue. The confident poetic voice takes things for granted, is never self-conscious about what it says, however unexpected or incomprehensible this may be. In a note on Betjeman’s ‘Myfanwy’ Amis says the poet has ‘got him where he wants’ with poems in this vein, ‘but I have never been able to work out quite where that ...”

“... policy, healthily excited by the new, politically and socially aware, but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities ...”

“... of, the Times on seven other pages. The Sunday Times features on six pages. The Times columnist Robert Harris gets two entries compared to Germaine Greer’s one, Gandhi’s one, or Mandela’s one. Noam Chomsky: nil. E.P Thompson: nil. The Times columnist Bernard Levin: two. Levin deserves a special mention. In the Times in May 1996, he implied that ...”

“... satisfy their curiosity: a sense of mystery pervades all her work. In the letters we discover her self-confessed longing for greatness – a yearning which could not be quelled, to the extent that she considered it her ‘demon’. We note a weakness for titles amounting to snobbery – her enjoyment of the aristocratic set and her pleasure at being addressed ...”

“... is no conclusive evidence either way, never went to bed with anyone and who, like some puritan and self-punishing Odysseus binding himself to the mast, chose to make his chief subject-matter the nude male body – which he rendered sometimes piteous and always impressive but never beguiling. Honourably, Dr Liebert avoids reductionism, and he confesses that ...”