“... plotting: since the crime has already been committed (the abduction of Owen Kane, the killing of Robert, the RUC officer), the narratives are internalised – rueful accounts of the lives of good but guilty men. The action is economical, the characters entirely engaging: both novels were made into successful films, full of psychological insights, unravelling ...”

“... demanding, disorderly libraries (‘Hazlitt, Mallarmé, and twenty volumes of Balzac; Dryden and Robert Graves; Cicero and Darwin, and, between them, a brand-new copy of By Love Possessed’); they travel heavy, toting copies of ‘Die Griechischen Altertümer, Le Trésor de Sifnos, Alexander’s Path’. Their sad goings are marked by sly nods in the ...”

“... coat. She modelled for magazine covers and considered acting (though she eventually turned down Robert Bresson’s offer of a lead role). But she’d begun hoarding knives and razor blades under the mattress and in her handbag. ‘My psychic pain was like a giant rat trap,’ she wrote later, ‘an inner scream that would not stop.’ Two years after giving ...”

“... Lawrence, but 1998 was the high-water mark for asteroid anxiety, giving us both Deep Impact (Robert Duvall and a team of astronauts blow up the asteroid with nuclear weapons; it mostly works) and Armageddon (Bruce Willis and a ragtag band of oilmen blow up the asteroid with nuclear weapons; it works). In real life, even assuming it were possible to fire ...”

“... On Wednesday, 25 September 1661, we find him making his way from St Martin’s Lane with Colonel Robert Slingsby: ‘He and I in his coach through the Mewes, which is the way that now all coaches are forced to go, because of a stop at Charing Cross, by reason of a drain there to clear the streets.’ He had been down that way the previous October, at St ...”

“... in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked about jazz with Robert Graves and about Keith Douglas with Edmund Blunden, the new professor of poetry. Poetry was both companionship and competition: ‘My own poems sounded hit-and-miss beside those of John Birtwhistle, who came up in my third year and stunned everyone at the ...”

“... measure of admiration as a scholar, a lawyer, a writer and a politician; for there is much in Robert Bolt’s adulatory A Man for All Seasons which reflects what we know of More. But More was not simply a principled Catholic; he was also something of a fanatic. The Victorian historian J.A. Froude described him as a merciless bigot. He described himself in ...”

“... the exception to the adage ‘Nomen est omen’: she should have been called Theresa Must. Pace Robert Frost, something there is in me that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down, and I suppose many Remainers feel the same. For Leavers – being remainers at heart, who find safety in permanence, who are perhaps a little prone to agoraphobia – the more ...”

“... Island was his home. As a schoolboy of 16 in 1951 he was there with a visiting ornithologist, Robert Murphy, and Louis Mowbray, the director of the aquarium, when the extraordinary discovery was made of a surviving cahow on a tiny outcrop not far from Nonsuch Island, three centuries after it was thought to have become extinct. When he had completed his ...”

“... account of her life by Bamber Gascoigne, and then David Attenborough’s reading of two poems by Robert Frost. There appears to have been a Feddenesque delicacy and some well-placed dabs of humour to the whole affair. ‘Very Mary,’ Catherine said. The phrase ‘order of service’ isn’t Catholic. I never heard it in the chapels of my youth (we had ...”

“... persisted even when Skelt’s, the biggest manufacturers, halved the price. It’s the title of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay in Memories and Portraits, in which he recalls his generation’s passion for toy theatres; the wait to save up for a new play and the agony of choosing just one from the stationer’s shop in Leith, ‘which was dark and smelled ...”

“... this model, the Iraqi people are a blank sheet on which to inscribe the ideas of William Kristol, Robert Kagan and other deep thinkers of the Far Right. As I said in an earlier article for the LRB (17 October 2002), such ideas were first tried out by Ariel Sharon in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion, and then more recently in Palestine, where, in terms of ...”

“... on early modern astronomy at a meeting of the US History of Science Society in 1974. One of them, Robert Westman, punctured the euphoria and astonished all present with the news that he had found a third Tychonic copy, in the Prague-Vatican hand, in Liège. Soon after this unsettling meeting, Gingerich found a fourth such copy in London. Why had Tycho ...”

“... it was abroad: indeed, the English ‘translation’ of Cuvier’s great works by the Scotsman Robert Jameson emphasised the concordance of the geological and the biblical record far more than the original had. In short, the traditional British drama, with its heroes and villains, is a romanticised confection designed to put our national achievements at ...”

“... of something they have seen and absorbed. But they’re not good enough as actors. Unless you’re Robert De Niro, the fridge door always catches when you open it, the cigarette lighter won’t work first time. He learns that there is only one way to eliminate the intransigence of material things: you have to be a better mimic than the mimics, to repeat and ...”