“... 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 ...”

“... and Johnny” than to Tristan and Iseult,’ Spiegelman says, ‘but March had been a protégé of Robert Frost’s at Amherst, and knew his way around villanelles as well as around speakeasies.’ Frost’s name is a good clue, since The Wild Party’s best known lines echo, in a bleak, jazz-inflected register, one of Frost’s most famous poems: Some say ...”

“... signalled his intentions to his far-flung sublunar creatures. No need for poets then to ask, with Robert Frost, whether design governed in so small a thing as a royal bastard’s rebellion or a reflagged Kuwaiti oil ship. In fact, neither Lilly nor Ashmole would have needed to wonder whether such seemingly minor events might escalate into large and then ...”

“... parses and dishes up, not fussily garnished but imbued with Shakespeare, Henry James, Jane Austen, Robert Graves, and the shade of Kipling, who seems also to get a tribute from Mukherjee in the name of the farm dog Shadow, and whose father worked in Lahore. She has the gift she ascribes to her sisters, of taking the world on her tongue. ‘Interested in ...”

“... soon afterwards in a series of cases which brought Holroyd into open revolt. An SAS officer called Robert Nairac gave Holroyd a Polaroid photograph of the dead body of an IRA leader called John Green. Nairac, later to be shot himself, told Holroyd he had taken the picture after personally shooting Green. Nairac said that he and two Protestant terrorists had ...”

“... No, what scotched the Disraelian legend as serious history was the standard biography by Robert Blake in 1966. Lord Blake possesses unimpeachable credentials as the eminent chronicler of the evolution of the Conservative Party. But he maintains also irreproachable standards as an academic historian, and these made his Disraeli disconcerting reading ...”

“... misses that note of implacable hostility which mars the otherwise creative and convincing work of ...”

“... claims made on his behalf, Michael Hofmann’s recent hailing of Brodsky as the true successor to Robert Lowell and great American poet of our age has at least the virtue of unambivalence. We may not agree with it, but the terms are clear. Hitherto, through no fault of his own, the poet has seemed to occupy a position of statelessness somewhere between ...”

“... a wonderful poem by Les Murray, terrific poet and world-class fatty, called ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’. The poem begins: Is it possible that hyper- ventilating up Parnassus I have neglected to pay tribute to the Stone Age aristocracy?    I refer to the fat. This raises the question of who were the first fatties. It may be that – without ...”