“... 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 ...”

“... and the London literary scene, where, in another part of the wood, Auden took pleasure in telling Robert Lowell, with his history of mental illness: ‘Gentlemen don’t go mad.’ This is the scene which was and may still be regarded as the post-Bloomsbury stronghold of the national literature. There’s an affinity between the candour and humour of ...”

“... of these possibilities are fascinating, whatever our scepticism may be about the larger project. Robert Nozick is cited (twice) as producing the elegant suggestion that we don’t have to choose between presence and absence, or between Heidegger’s Seiendes and Nichts, since we could have both, eventually (perhaps ‘the universe is not yet spiritually ...”

“... I had lunch with a writer friend of my foster mother, along with five or six visiting Russians and Robert Graves. Graves of the halo of curly white hair, not at all good looking, fat and pasty, in his late sixties or early seventies. I sat at the table opposite him in awed silence, gazing, longing for him to speak to me, not daring to say anything for fear ...”

“... it’s more controlled, with less cartoonish focal characters and, early on, a good line in Robert Stone-like unease. The main action takes place in Indonesia during Sukarno’s confrontation with Malaysia, and again there’s the germ of an allegory: at the heart of the plot are two orphaned boys who’ve been separated and brought up in the contending ...”

“... access to the corridors of power through its alumni network, which also included such figures as Robert Rubin, Clinton’s treasury secretary. If Goldman Sachs’s omnipotence is more than a piece of marketing hyperbole, he should have looked a lot harder at this issue. As it is, there is some reason to believe that Goldman’s heyday may be over. Higher ...”

“... 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 ...”