“... past) told Sir Maurice that his secret about positive vetting was known. Oldfield confessed to Sir Robert Armstrong, secretary to the Cabinet, and left his post. He was ill. He had cancer, but an army hospital diagnosed it as diverticulitis. He was wrongly diagnosed until near the end. He died in 1981. MI5 were not satisfied with his death. In 1987, there were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

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

“... London but ended up running a tiny, undemanding parish in the City, overshadowed by St Paul’s. Robert Peter, a brilliant Classics scholar at Cambridge, ‘achieved so little because he was a fool’; moreover, he was cruel to choirboys and horses. Henry Carrington, a dilettante, failed to take on the Dissenters, resorted to wintering in Italy, leaving ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”