“... 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 ...”

“... record of his baptism at St Marylebone in London. In May 1792 he was sponsored for a cadetship by Robert Thornton MP, an East India Company director. A note signed by Sir Hector corrected the error in the baptismal record. Young Hector was a ‘cadet for Madras’ and sailed on the Earl Talbot a month later, arriving at Calcutta on 8 November. His expected ...”

“... desire to see them included, had to be kept out if the project was to have any credibility (though Robert Boothby, another of its protagonists, suggested that Salazar might ‘concoct a special brand of Portuguese democracy’ to get Portugal under the wire). It also followed, particularly in the view of British conservatives and French Catholics, that some ...”

“... delights in contradictory messages), Mike Kelley (who also probes the pathetic underside of men), Robert Gober (who also presents the body image as divided, even damaged), and Doris Salcedo and Mona Hatoum (who also evoke spaces of social anomie and political violence). And the influence extends to the next generation as well, with Matthew Barney (art is what ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was not accepted at once. Dyson was now joining the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Robert Oppenheimer, its director, at first refused to believe in the new theories, or in Dyson’s exposition. Oppenheimer usually had a very quick and deep perception, but when he did not accept an argument he could be very cutting in his comment and make it ...”

“... that somewhere along the line he absorbed the influence, for example, of the Minnesota poets, Robert Bly and James Wright. He has the same candour and simplicity, and, like them, sometimes lays himself open to a charge of naivety – technical as much as emotional, if we can distinguish between the two. But his naivety, if such it is, differs ...”