“... 1568 founded the seminary in Douai for the training of English missionary priests, and the Jesuit Robert Parsons, the position taken by the Catholic and Protestant authorities alike was that men faced damnation in dissembling their faith. Nevertheless, a way around the dilemma was found in the doctrine of mental reservation, which was most fully developed in ...”

“... then they were played by Cagney and Bogart, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson. Al Pacino and Robert de Niro changed all that. Now I concentrated on two Actors B and D, who were not Italian-American. I had surreptitiously met Actor B, my original choice, while I was at Fox meeting a producer from Columbia. He was nice but depressed and frustrated, and ...”

“... and statues – the Ozymandias complex. But they are hopelessly old-fashioned, and any reader of Robert Graves could mentally update the plot as they expire in a chaos of money laundries, drug deals and palace feuds. Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, the two tyrants of this title, belonged to a specific breed that might be termed the unpatriotic or ...”

“... hard it is being a man and having to stake your claim and prove your wonderfulness at every turn. Robert Bly says men need a male mother, and that’s fine by me. But I won’t believe it isn’t harder to be a woman until the day, should it ever come, when the balance of power is so drastically reversed that women can get into serious trouble, lose their ...”

“... it is fair to say that Hillary Clinton’s relationship to her husband reminds people of Robert Kennedy’s relationship to his brother: trusted adviser, companion, friend. It is striking that Hillary Clinton’s up-front influence is so threatening to an electorate which has had to face up to the realities of a Reagan Administration held hostage to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... over into Fleet Street. But even more important, two new proprietors have arrived in Fleet Street: Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch, each warriors in the tabloid newspaper circulation war. Maxwell secured large job cuts at the Mirror by threats and cajoling. Murdoch could not be slow to follow. But Murdoch is also engaged in a huge gamble in the USA ...”

“... and at their worst, as when the chimney catches fire and neither Burgo, the Partridges’ son, nor Robert Kee, a much loved friend, stir from their armchairs to help put it out. Her approach to people is rather like her botanist’s approach – that these human creatures had been thrown up willy-nilly on the earth’s crust and must be treated with tender ...”

“... the market was for ‘bilingual’ dictionaries (especially Latin-English). We had to wait upon Robert Cawdrey in 1604 for a ‘monolingual’ model – aimed at ‘Ladies … or other unskilfull persons’. But the principles and goals are essentially the same. We don’t look up door to find that it means the chunk of material that seals off rooms and ...”

“... an absence of personal piety’. On the second, research might be possible. According to Robert Speaight’s account of Chesterton’s death, the Times printed what Belloc ‘rightly described as a “crapulous” obituary’, but there was a ‘noble tribute’ in the Observer – and it was by Belloc. Amusing stories, circulating without any ...”

“... thought. There are some fascinating hints of this, in references to his admiration for Sir Robert Peel, his fondness for cautious, piecemeal change, his lack of reverence for history (combined with an element of pious nostalgia for his father’s heyday in the late 19th century). Above all, there is his utter remoteness from the socio-sacramental ...”

“... This is a translation of a book first published under the title Das Spiel in 1975. It is an ambitious book whose aim is to convey to the reader what it is to have a well-furnished scientific mind. Some years back, C.P. Snow persuaded us that the diagnostic characteristic of such a mind is familiarity with the second law of thermodynamics. His particular choice of a scientific law was unfortunate, because it is easier to talk nonsense about the second law than almost anything else, but in principle he was on the right track ...”

“... earlier to Lucian [sic] Freud and by her third marriage to the illustrious American poet, the late Robert Frost. Frost and Blackwood? It’s a nice idea, but really ... In the matter of self-accusation, though, Davie makes Lord Longford seem trivial. The Barnsley poet’s grapplings are sombre and serpentine, and even though he usually comes out of the ...”

“... cultivated by Lady Morgan – as for Scotchness. Jane Austen was impressed by neither Glorvina nor Robert Burns, championing instead that model of quiet English moral sobriety Fanny Price. Brigid Brophy’s funniest piece is on fish, that silent persecuted majority, whom even hostesses who are delighted to provide a vegetarian meal (‘Oh, by the way, you do ...”