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“... pen and ‘candle coal’ for ink. Other impressive examples of the ‘alternative culture’ are Robert Copland’s low-life ‘The High Way to the Spital House’, a dialogue between the poet and a porter, who explains: Forsooth, yea, we do all such folk in take,    That do ask lodging for Our Lord’s sake; And indeed it is our custom and use ...”

“... identified as ‘a philosopher, the brother of the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein’. Robert Musil occupies the summit of Canetti’s esteem until he is demoted after a show of petulance at a tactless mention of his archrival Thomas Mann. Herman Broch was Canetti’s great friend at the beginning of the period but fades out of the narrative as it ...”

“... example to enthusiastic religious groups, or to wayward individuals, served certain purposes. That Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy was, as Johnson thought, magisterial, and unread. Above all, that madness was proximate to Reason, indeed twinned to the idea of ‘Reason’, and that madness was the secret history of the Enlightenment, its exhausted ...”

“... at the end of ‘Report on Experience’ was sincere. Blunden and Sassoon were furious when Robert Graves published in 1929 Goodbye to All That. Blunden’s comments are of great significance, and deserve to be taken seriously as evidence of what men who loathed the war, and had been through a great deal of it, actually felt and continued to feel. Very ...”

“... The formation of a new Israeli government made up of the ultra-nationalist Right and the ultra-Orthodox is a propitious moment to reflect on the role of the radical Right in the history of Zionism. The state of Israel was created by left-wing elements, led by the social-democratic Labour Party. The Revisionists were the right wing of Zionism prior to 1948, but they were a small constellation in the Zionist firmament, a minority opposition in a largely socialist movement ...”

“... Betjeman. Larkin, of course, is the one contemporary to whom Amis is prepared to yield high marks (Robert Conquest, perhaps the most ‘all right’ of Kingsley’s literary cronies, is shunted off into ‘light verse’). Larkin is named as Amis’s second-favourite poet (Housman is tops, though he may not have stayed tops, we suspect, if Amis had ever sat ...”

“... in her prose. One function of the novel is the commemoration and celebration of Sassoon and Owen. Robert Graves is a more equivocal spectre. The cadences of Goodbye to All That have sounded in Barker’s work before. In a climactic moment towards the end of The Century’s Daughter a social worker rescues the parrot belonging to the book’s dead heroine. He ...”

“... never allowed any one minister a monopoly of power; but he underplays the monopoly enjoyed by Robert Cecil in the 1590s, which Cecil himself looked back on with regret once he had lost it in the next reign. And the depiction of the weak and bullied James VI is frankly simplistic – indeed, arguably simply wrong. MacCaffrey’s footnotes are mainly ...”

“... Thoreau and the New England Enlightenment, worked as a volunteer in the Presidential campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. She seemed to have a brilliant career in the US before her: in 1970 the Washington Post published a gushing profile of her. But she was profoundly distressed – seems to have felt betrayed, even – by the assassinations of ...”

“... us that ‘Zone is the old-fashioned word for la banlieue, the suburbs: according to the Petit Robert, la Zone comprised “les faubourgs misérables”. The people described here lived, mostly, in the heart of Paris, but, being on the margins of French society, they were also confined, in a way, to la Zone.’ In what way? Exile and marginality mean ...”

“... membership of Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons would necessarily reveal the more admirable qualities of those ...”

“... but just a mechanism for improbable adventures. In Colonel Sun, his own imitation under the alias Robert Markham, Kingsley Amis showed that he understood this, but the knowledge only deprived him of his own powers while not giving him Fleming’s. The only memorable moment in the book has Bond, at the moment just before some disaster strikes, driving quietly ...”

“... is here revealed for the first time. But his relations with the Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, were mostly cordial, his term of office was generally deemed a success, and he and his wife returned to Britain in 1915 amidst near-universal feelings of appreciation and regret. By then the Duke was 66, and Queen Victoria’s only surviving ...”

“... a smile of disbelief when Crimp ponderously discusses which is the more revolutionary art form: Robert Mapplethorpe’s nudes (appropriating the style of ‘classical’ photography for explicitly gay eroticism) or Sherrie Levine’s re-photographs of earlier photographs of Ed Weston (appropriating quite literally the material of classical photography, in ...”

“... appeared in Punch and the other papers on the eve of the invasion. The celebrated photographer Robert Capa was there, however, at least in the third wave or so, and before he scrambled back on the landing-craft he ‘felt a shock and was suddenly covered in feathers’. He wondered if somebody had been killing chickens. Then I saw that the superstructure ...”