“... managed to get home to Boston in 1787 after eight years’ absence. Davis’s near contemporary John Nicol was a romantic like Spavens: ‘I had read Robinson Crusoe many times over and longed to be at sea.’ He volunteered for the navy at Leith in 1776, as soon as he had finished his apprenticeship as a cooper, eager ...”

“... of US-Soviet relations, complete with a speech by Olivia de Havilland … The next day, John Wayne learns that the Selective Service board has extended his 3-A deferment. Hot dog! The star celebrates Thanksgiving Day by carving turkeys at the canteen, even as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet in Tehran to plan the US invasion of Europe. The ...”

“... taking all the southern poets possessed, even down to their southern linguistic forms. Mairi Robinson, on the other hand, produces an excellent large-scale map of variation between Scots and English in the versions of the Scots Confession of 1560. Her conclusions, crudely, are that ‘written English was regarded as being “our commoun toung” by Scots ...”

“... Puritan preacher Hugh Peter wanted to pull down Stonehenge, and the 18th-century Baptist Thomas Robinson boasted that he had ‘killed’ 40 stones at Avebury with his own hands. But, like the radicals who proposed that all churches and cathedrals should be razed to the ground, they were generally thought to be going too far. Protestants retained their ...”

“... are the constant companions of the earnest seeker after light), and the great unclassifiable, John Bunyan. The composition of this canon changed somewhat as new names established themselves, though working-class reading always lagged a literary generation or two behind. (Penurious readers, picking up their books from second-hand stalls, could rarely ...”

“... no history of the Film Society, which operated until 1939, has yet been written. A draft by David Robinson, written in 1963 and held at the British Film Institute, was vetoed by Iris Barry because she felt that it gave the ‘quite unfair and incorrect impression that the FS was largely some sort of organ of Soviet propaganda and its members a horde of ...”

“... were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind friend who could have whispered something tactful?) As John Updike has put it in a very thoughtful fashion commentary on the whole unfortunate business: Ike, for instance, dear Ike with his infallible instincts, would never have let himself be caught in lace stockings, even though he did have the legs for them. I ...”

“... Snows of Kilimanjaro. Some of the best directors she worked with – Albert Lewin, George Cukor, John Huston – tried to locate what they felt was the private, natural quality in her so as to catch it on film. But Gardner, who had been obviously shy when she was young, was still secretly shy when older, and even oddly shy before the camera. As a ...”

“... and make clear the precariousness of their position on what its current first minister, Peter Robinson of Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, once described as ‘the window ledge of the Union’. A colonial strangeness lurks behind such seemingly familiar phenomena as student drunkenness. Belfast’s Holy Land is an area between Queen’s University ...”

“... definition of ‘devirgination’. He was one of three of Murray’s readers to scrutinise John Bulwer’s 1650 Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or, the Artificall Changling; between them they submitted more than a thousand slips dealing with words relating to sex and bodily mutilation. The second of the three was an unnamed American living in ...”

“... and instinctively deceitful. When his father died in 1930, he erected a tombstone claiming that John Jesse Barnes had served the full four years of the Civil War, instead of an actual six months.Numerous friends and acquaintances testified to Barnes’s ‘complexity’. The painter Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, described him as ‘magnificent ...”

“... with attention to authors from Homer, Chaucer and Charlotte Yonge to Donald Barthelme and John Barth. A number of the contributors focus on 18th-century fiction, others on 20th-century film, two places where one might most readily expect to find evidence of sequelmania. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s self-fulfilling prophecy in The Terminator, ‘I’ll be ...”

“... jobs on the Civil and Military Gazette was to epitomise Blue Books: according to his editor, Kay Robinson, he did his best to convert them into ‘interesting and picturesque narratives’.) The reports and essays of the English reformers tended to follow a pattern: departure from a police station, descent into the slums, a chronicle of filth and rot and ...”

“... for fresh marches of conquest. The ensuing adventures were narrated with devastating flatness by John Hemming in The Search for El Dorado. The gold-hunters got lost, ate grubs, grass and one another, were plagued by bugs and vampires, swelled or shrivelled or turned orange, devoured sweaty saddles in fits of salt-thirst, perished of ...”

“... if he painted at night it would be with the erratic assistance of a hurricane lamp ... like Robinson Crusoe he could report that he had “managed to achieve almost complete solitude”.’ Fairweather is easy to mythologise, particularly if you envy the lifestyle. Bail peers through a connoisseur’s magnifying-glass – with a sensuous, sharp ...”