“... Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, Grew’s Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas Burnett’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Bentley’s ...”

“... of Unionist voters as part of that overall vote. There is also an article by the No-campaigner Robert McCartney, a barrister and UK Unionist MP whom no one in Britain I know has ever heard of. Perhaps that’s because he’s kept the press on their guard with his proven readiness to sue for libel (there was a famous episode in Northern Ireland some years ...”

“... possession of them and then they lose their appetites and get ill.’ Only the ‘robust, hardy’ Robert, older than Jack, and two years younger than Lolly, is never attacked. ‘Bobby has sensibility,’ his father wrote, ‘will love ideas and have enthusiasms, ardours, and will go through more emotional experiences in a month than another in ten ...”

“... of Nijinsky’s startling performance at the hotel he began to write a diary – a series of savage declarations, the mirror (or the blackboard) of a creative mind on the slide, incorporating letters to people he loved or loathed. As the diary ends he is on his way to see Eugen Bleuler – the man who came up with the word ‘schizophrenic’ – and not ...”

“... Now I know they were just pioneers, ahead of their time.’ There is plenty more of this quietly savage tone in Diary of a Bad Year, and lots about the facility at Guantánamo Bay and ‘national shame’. ‘Dishonour is no respecter of fine distinctions. Dishonour descends upon one’s shoulders, and once it has descended no amount of clever pleading will ...”

“... we have no right’. Mindful of the ancient Greek fable about ‘the bird in borrowed feathers’, Robert Greene dismissed William Shakespeare in 1592 as that ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’ who dared to mingle among London’s established writers. Meanwhile, in English markets, items misleadingly claiming to be made entirely from desirable ...”

“... helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way down, Robert Lowells (d. 1977, with the Collected Poems coming next year) are a good buy; stock in Anthony Burgess (d. 1993) should probably be held for a year or two; Borgeses (d. 1986) will surge once the editing and republishing are sorted out; James Merrills ...”

“... with clouds of burning incense. The rest of the house is lugubrious, the grounds guarded by savage dogs that can be called off only by shouting commands in German (Sitz! Platz! Auf!). Every night she lets her guest choose another of her films to watch; she keeps the reels in a frigidaire. In a safe beside her bed she hides her jewels, tapes of her ...”

“... original publisher withdrew, and the judges quit in protest over his treatment. One of them was Robert Lowell, whom Seidel had interviewed for the Paris Review the previous year. Final Solutions, which was eventually published by Random House, is laboriously indebted to Lowell, though the poems often resemble what Randall Jarrell described as the ...”

“... well as much of the Israeli public, regards as evidence of their humanitarian ethos. But not even Robert Menendez, one of the US Senate’s most redoubtable supporters of Israel, was persuaded. ‘I am deeply troubled,’ he said, ‘by reports of Israeli military actions that resulted in the death of innocent civilians in Gaza as well as Israeli targeting of ...”

“... fire, destroying or damaging more than two hundred volumes from the famous collection of Sir Robert Cotton. As a result, some words of the poem are irretrievably lost, while others are known only from transcriptions made in the 18th century, before the charred edges had crumbled. Wellesley gives a stirring account of the Cotton fire, noting that heroic ...”

“... Raban attempts to probe beneath the rhetoric to the actual experience of these emigrants. Robert Louis Stevenson’s caustic characterisations of his fellow passengers in his marvellous The Amateur Emigrant are delightedly and extensively quoted as evidence of the real motivations behind the movement westwards: ‘We were a company of the ...”

“... in the weather tended to be smoothed out. In the short run, contingency mattered, as did bouts of savage weather. But in the long run, climate and geography dominated. Melissa Charenko’s book tracks what happened to climate science when new technologies vastly extended its chronological reach. In the mid-19th century, long-held assumptions about climate ...”

“... seems so long ago. Zimbabwe has just celebrated the third anniversary of its independence. Comrade Robert Mugabe rules. Ministers have been fired, reinstated, shuffled sideways. The British have made an integrated national army out of the two guerrilla forces and the North Koreans have invited themselves to train a separate praetorian guard. The IMF has been ...”

“... from the classics, which all readers above the rank of ragamuffin were expected to recognise. Sir Robert Peel (Sir Rhubarb Pill) did duty as Pandora, Ceres, Phaeton and Sisyphus. However, when the Duke of Buckingham was shown as ‘The Modern Eresicthon’ preparing to eat his own head, the magazine thought fit to explain that Eresicthon of Thessaly, having ...”