“... was noisy, lively, inventive – a ‘political carnival’, as Lynn Bennie, James Mitchell and Robert Johns describe it in their new book, Surges in Party Membership: The SNP and Scottish Greens after the Independence Referendum (Routledge, £135). Its ‘innovative campaigning methods’ included ‘campaign stalls, impromptu flash mobs, city marches and ...”

“... years in government. The miasma of corruption wreathes Badenoch’s most plausible challenger, Robert Jenrick, who has been pumping out Reform-tinged jeremiads on X. Polling suggests he’d be even less popular. Given its efflux of activists and politicians to Reform, the eventual fate of the Conservatives may be as a vestigial electoral appendage, a ...”

“... on the edge of Hampstead Heath and one of the finest surviving examples of the mature designs of Robert Adam. Two years later, Lord Iveagh died, bequeathing Kenwood to the nation, along with 63 Old Master and 18th-century British paintings from his own collection, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough and Reynolds, as an example of the ...”

“... emissions from vehicle engines, and on the same page is another piece on the subject by Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz, the future chief SS medical officer and Himmler’s extermination adviser, who in 1945 killed himself, his wife and their son with hand grenades. Some of the Nazis’ lethal experiments with carbon monoxide took place at Sachsenhausen camp, just ...”

“... Bardrochat, the other family house, an Arts and Crafts mansion in Ayrshire with a music room by Robert Lorimer. The genial chaos of country house life disconcerted some visitors. The photographer Lee Friedlander thought it was like ‘being in the middle of a British novel’, speculating that there were probably people who stayed the whole summer. McEwen ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”

“... Both phrases are perfectly clear, yet each is as far as possible from what the insufferable Robert Nye commends in the diction of Grigson: ‘how close that idiom comes to living speech’. Much virtue in that ‘living’! For Gurney, the life that there is in English speech has been injected into it by lonely, learned and masterfully artificial ...”

“... long books in German only if they absolutely have to, non sine ira et studio) owe a great deal to Robert Wallace. He has translated eight hundred pages of very tough German as lucidly as literalness permits. (We also owe a lot to the MIT Press series ‘Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought’, which promises more Blumenberg books in the ...”

“... knows why they happen, and nobody knows how to halt or even satisfactorily slow the degeneration. Robert Will, the neurologist at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh who heads the Government’s CJD surveillance unit, points out that although CJD is rare, we still know a great deal more about it than about many other more common neurological diseases. There ...”

“... I dwell,’ and you see why the line disgusted a generation that valued irony and understatement. Robert Lowell told Spender that the line should be ‘I would think continually of those who are truly great’ because, as he patiently explained, ‘one cannot think of the great all the time, though one may wish to do so’; but the line, with its illogic and ...”

“... This background gave Oliver something in common with other leading Parliamentarians, notably Robert and Henry Rich, the earls of Warwick and Holland, descendants of the iniquitous Sir Richard Rich. They were all of them ardent Puritans, but they were also hard-faced men whose forefathers had done well out of the dissolution of the monasteries. The ...”

“... the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the second volume of Robert Crawford’s sensitive biography, it’s the Tom and Em bits.This is unfortunate: Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’ is a rich study of the period from 1922 until Eliot’s death in 1965 – years that contained much besides a complicated love ...”

“... in order to advance their careers and secure an income. On becoming prime minister in the 1720s, Robert Walpole gave posts to six members of his family (brothers, sons and in-laws), as well as to other long-time supporters, prompting the charge that Britain was governed by a ‘Robinocracy’. As late as 1831, Earl Grey was accused of securing offices for ...”

“... politics; from the legalisation of abortion and divorce by mutual consent to the translation of Robert Paxton’s Vichy France. He even includes an attack on French filmmakers for portraying French people as narrow-minded and racist, not to mention feminising the image of the ‘white heterosexual male’. And that was only the 1970s, before the arrival of ...”

“... contracts worth $3.5 million. Bloom appears to be a small-time wheeler-dealer. More interesting is Robert Stein, his alleged co-conspirator, who was the CPA’s Comptroller and Funding Officer for the South-Central region. Stein has been convicted of fraud and sued for embezzlement in previous business dealings with the US military in the States. He is a ...”