“... and harder to do without. (When I googled A Very British Coup, the first result was an article by Robert Peston describing the recent attempt by Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn and Oliver Letwin to seize parliamentary control of the Brexit process. The headline read: ‘A very British coup against the PM’.) The second thing is Jeremy Corbyn. The book is now ...”

“... We won’t allow people to censor our past,’ Robert Jenrick, then communities secretary, said in January. ‘It is our privilege in this country to have inherited a deep, rich, fascinating and yes, often complex, past. We are mature enough as a society to understand that and to seek to pass it on, warts and all ...”

“... are fond are perhaps too blithely rinsed off. Children betray their mothers. I thought of Robert Frost, in a poem like ‘Design’, sidling up to the reader before shivving him with ‘design of darkness to appal’. Much of Stallings’s work can seem like light verse that suddenly appals: solid, foundational stanzas that chat directly with ...”

“... veterans commissioned by Queen Victoria: glimpsed only in reproduction is Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett’s stark portrayal of three amputees, two double and one single, sat together on a bed, taking up not enough space between them. Victoria commissioned this quiet image and many others like them for her personal collection (they deserve to be ...”

“... one form of which was the Mesopotamian mother goddess. Evans’s theory was popularised by Robert Graves, who published The White Goddess in 1948, followed a year later by Seven Days in New Crete, a novel set in a matriarchal religious utopia. In the early 1950s the modern religion of Wicca, introduced by the retired civil servant Gerald Gardner, took ...”

“... morning, lying there with a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she admitted), she was still in demand for lectures and ...”

“... it were to be wished of all wise men and Her Majesty’s good subjects,’ he wrote to Robert Dudley, ‘that one of these two queens of the isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man, to make so happy a marriage, as thereby there might be a unity of the whole isle.’ Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots by François Clouet ...”

“... were then part of Team 4; and the first hyperbolic paraboloid roof in Britain, created in 1957 by Robert Townsend for the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Townsend’s own house in the otherwise benighted village of Durrington is extant and retains its freshness. Orbach considers it ‘the most interesting house of its period in the county’. The ...”

“... finds his father again in strange circumstances. The scene was once famous, at that high noon when Robert Louis Stevenson thought Meredith second only to Shakespeare. Roy has become a sort of court jester for a German margravine and – to cut a long story short – has agreed to pose as a newly erected equestrian statue in bronze, so that she can win a ...”

“... observed.’ Writing of this kind points towards the sociological thinkers of the 19th-century – Robert Owen, John Stuart Mill, Charles Booth – more certainly than towards the Romantics; and the same preoccupations are found scattered in her View of the French Revolution and in the fragments of her novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, with its striking ...”

“... source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the young man isn’t looking quite himself. ‘You’re ...”

“... 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 ...”