“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by the Brontës, Dickens and Thackeray and nearly everything that he could find associated with Robert Louis Stevenson. He also had a number of trophy items like Shakespeare’s First Folio (though copies of the Folio were not so hard to find: his contemporary Henry Folger collected 79). In 1912 the Wideners visited London, where Harry purchased a rare ...”

“... there isn’t now. Yet we should still think about Boy A and Boy B, who only became known to us as Robert Thompson and Jon Venables when the judge in the original trial proved over-zealous in meeting press demands that the boys be named and their likenesses published. There isn’t another country in Europe where two ten-year-olds in trouble would have been ...”

“... often used here, one borrowed from recent work on Nietzschean philosophy, especially that of Robert Pippin. ‘In fashioning our arguments and forming intentions from these commitments,’ Hawthorn writes, summarising Pippin’s summary of Nietzsche, ‘we more often than not embellish, qualify or transmute them and so hide them from ourselves and each ...”

“... Die in Seven Days’ and so on. After getting out of jail, Moat got a gun and a haircut ‘like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver’, and he repeatedly called Sam, who had broken up with him when he was inside; she rejected him. On the night of Friday, 2 July, he was driven to Birtley, where Sam lived, by his friend Karl Ness. He tracked Sam and her boyfriend ...”

“... to be their best and most enduring. Fulcrum also published two important early collections by Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North Central and My Life by Water, and George Oppen’s Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy ...”

“... about its anxieties, distortions and deformations, was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel, which until the mid-1980s every trade unionist, Labour Party member and left-leaning student in Britain could safely be said to have read, or at least heard of. Then in 1984 everyone put it down and picked up Money. For the benefit of anyone too ...”

“... 43. And there’s Schubert, who in the mid-1930s enrolled in Amherst College (where he befriended Robert Frost), dropped out, rematriculated and dropped out again; who suffered bouts of depression and underwent electric-shock treatment in the early 1940s; and who died of tuberculosis in 1946 at the age of 33. As for Ashbery, he worked on the Norton Lectures ...”

“... respectability or aristocratic imprimatur. When the author of Vestiges was finally revealed to be Robert Chambers, Scottish encyclopedist and prolific publisher of improving works, the exposure curiously diminished the book’s effectiveness, because it could be regarded from that point on as no more than a ‘popular’ book. Its marginalisation had ...”

“... Picasso was a force of nature, whose unique vitality was just as evident in his late work. Robert Hughes was scathing in Time magazine: The last Picassos are also the worst. It seems hardly imaginable that so great a painter could have whipped off, even in old age, such hasty and superficial doodles. One enters in homage and leaves in embarrassment ...”

“... the surface the big story was that Bush had finally sacked Rumsfeld, and installed the pragmatic Robert Gates in his place. But the more important story – concealed from the public – was that the president’s senior military advisers had lost all credibility: when it came to setting policy, the views of the active-duty four stars no longer mattered. By ...”