“... there would have been too upsetting.’In The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (1989), Robert Wistrich argues that for Roth ‘the world of the shtetl re-emerged as the ideal embodiment of a lost intimacy and innocence; the materialist values of the Western Bürgertum (Jewish and Gentile) represented its self-alienated antithesis.’ Roth’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Blyth’s banalities, are at odds with this discordant factor, and only Sir Frederick Ashton and Robert Tear express an independent disenchantment, the former in something close to bitchiness, the latter in a more technical way: Tear was banished after choosing to sing Dov in The Knot Garden rather than Lechmere in Owen Wingrave, and there can surely be no ...”

“... Blackheath with their holdalls, or nipping round the corner from the Telegraph with a fistful of Robert Hales or Arthur Barkers. One esteemed figure at the Times used to order a taxi for noon on Friday and when it arrived he would have a flunkey load it up with art books and American encyclopedias. He would then squeeze in beside his booty and, with ...”

“... band. And the best brass-player of his generation, a black called Cato, began his career as Sir Robert Walpole’s footman before being passed, like a favourite horse or dog, first to the Earl of Chesterfield and then to the Prince of Wales and his son, the future George III. The Louis Armstrong of Augustan England ended his days, apparently, as royal ...”

“... branch of the ‘identity’ lobby spoke of the new affinity it felt with Californian poets like Robert Duncan. Again, the word ‘geography’ was used: it made geographical sense for Australians to cosy up with San Francisco. To balance the provincial angst, there were also a number of sneering cosmopolitans, but they tended not to sit on platforms. They ...”

“... American past. One result was Pariotic Gore, a vast and laborious book he did not enjoy writing. Robert Lowell called it the American Plutarch, which is ingenious but wrong. Patriotic Gore is probably, from the point of view of British readers, over-represented in Dabney’s selection, though it could be argued that the long pieces on Ulysses S. Grant and ...”

“... Ford, Pennsylvania. The compositions are sparse, and often uneasily balanced. His paintings and Robert Frost’s poetry describe similar landscapes and characters. Frost has been better respected by critics, but Wyeth has advocates among the directors of famous American public galleries, and their patrons. The Helga Pictures is the catalogue of the ...”

“... In publishing his compendious work Metahistory in 1973, Hayden White gave currency both to a term and to a programme. His subtitle, ‘The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe’, indicated the broad area of his investigations, but gave little sense of the radical originality of this programme, which was quite simply the re-examination of historiography in its written form ...”

“... the road, she drags herself along, semi-invited, to a New Year’s Eve party at the Skidelskys (‘Robert ... is a brilliant historian who was made a lord this summer’). Needless to say, none of these occasions turns out quite as she would have wished. At the Booker dinner, she has a pretty uninspiring time next to Kingsley Amis (who deserts her for ‘more ...”

“... peace lost. It is appropriate that the first letter included in this volume should complain about Robert Buchanan, who had found in Kipling’s work ‘all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage, in the restless and uninstructed Hooliganism of the time’. The Boer War provided plenty of scope for hooligans. The notorious celebrations ...”

“... plotting: since the crime has already been committed (the abduction of Owen Kane, the killing of Robert, the RUC officer), the narratives are internalised – rueful accounts of the lives of good but guilty men. The action is economical, the characters entirely engaging: both novels were made into successful films, full of psychological insights, unravelling ...”

“... greasy till’. Was it For this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? ‘Delirium’ suggests Yeats’s usual equivocal insight; but more magnificently it celebrates the fever in the blood which was about to quicken the national pulses yet again. ‘Romantic ...”

“... this model, the Iraqi people are a blank sheet on which to inscribe the ideas of William Kristol, Robert Kagan and other deep thinkers of the Far Right. As I said in an earlier article for the LRB (17 October 2002), such ideas were first tried out by Ariel Sharon in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion, and then more recently in Palestine, where, in terms of ...”