“... investigative journalism, and Ms Moorehead has had to cover a lot of ground with speed. Sir Robert Mark has praised Fortune’s Hostages as a useful handbook: ‘required reading,’ he says, ‘in the unlikely and unhappy event that kidnapping here increased dramatically.’ In the meantime, it is interesting to discover, for example, the scale on ...”

“... al Buen Revolucionario, Monte Avila, Caracas, 1976: there is a French edition, published by Robert Laffont). This is a book which deserves to be better known here, which escapes Dr Norman’s bibliography, and which in its chapter on the Church argues that the unnatural alliance of Catholics and Marxists is in Latin America all too natural. Both for ...”

“... of kills at only 3 to 10 per cent of targets engaged. Other experts were more pessimistic; Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the radar authority, rated the chances of interception at a thousand to one. Nevertheless, according to Long-mate, operational trials were conducted and began to look promising. By that time, fortunately, the launching-sites had been destroyed ...”

“... to prove the money-earner – Clara remained the celebrity, perforce. Seven children later, Robert went mad (the syphilis theory seems supported by the subsequent life of at least one son). Clara, then still in her early thirties, had to make a renewed success of her career. She became one of the first touring artists to take advantage of the newly ...”

“... by an Afterword by John Fowles, less sensitive, but more enthusiastic. Fowles, who follows Robert Gibson* in taking Seurel as the central character, tells us that he was once under the influence of Alain-Fournier, and is still ‘a besotted fan’. He deserts the text, however, when he says that Frantz de Galais, like Meaulnes, ‘strives to maintain a ...”

“... most responsible and unexpected use of Emily Brontë and of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But it is Robert Browning who fails to furnish the one thing needed, and this is where the novel fails. The dramatic monologue, after all, grew out of the epistolary novel. Forster is writing essentially an epistolary novel for the age of the telephone, and what is needed ...”

“... last year: Chris Mullin’s on the Birmingham case, Paul Foot’s on the Bridgewater case and then Robert Kee’s* on the Guildford case. Kee’s is a drier, less passionate book than the other two, partly because its prose is more visibly marked by the size-12 footprints of the libel lawyer. Once again we have a crime that cried out for vengeance, with its ...”

“... in the Brera at Milan. Till now the picture’s identity has remained unknown, but my colleague Robert Dingley, to whose learning this review is much indebted, has identified it as one by the Russian artist Karl Brullov; it shows, in the sentimental fashion of the time, a series of pathetic incidents during the destruction of Pompeii. A year later, Bulwer ...”

“... Wittgenstein’s famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is written in a style that is austere and sometimes aphoristic. ‘The world is everything that is the case.’ ‘A picture presents a possible situation in logical space.’ ‘A logical picture of facts is a thought.’ ‘We cannot think of anything illogical, for to do so we should have to think illogically ...”

“... with working out what life would actually be like in the thought experiments. (He may criticise Robert Nozick’s impractical suggestions for regulating the genetic supermarket, as revealing ‘an unworldly innocence’, but a few chapters later he himself writes that ‘attitudes to privacy will vary according to whether there are governments’ – my ...”

“... playing with bile, courting disaster. A generation later, that other constitutional melancholic, Robert Burton, shut himself up in Christ Church and composed for twenty years. The outcome, the Anatomy of Melancholy, won him glory. But it was the testament of an embittered splenetic, a libeller of humanity, whose half a million words kept melancholy on the ...”

“... friends. The letters haven’t much to say about these books, except for a very good one to Robert Trevelyan about Where angels fear to tread. Mostly, the letters are home thoughts from abroad, weekly reports from some frontier of feeling Forster had either crossed or backed off from. You wouldn’t learn from the letters what it meant for him to fall ...”

“... to Zuckermann, taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised solely by the phrase: ‘created a sensation ...”

“... of Richard II makes much of the parents’ dual vision of their child-actors. ‘Do you prefer Robert on the throne or at the wicket?’ It is this, too, which underlies the prolonged, though thwarted, movement toward an amateur performance of Phaethon. ‘What was a mere amateur production of adolescent amateur singing and acting and playing could soar at ...”

“... Blasting the past has long been a habit of avant-garde artists and malcontent youth, but anti-passéisme has made small headway in the learned professions. They are keen on roots – for example, the roots of the modern in late 19th-century art, and its roots in romanticism; the cardinal assumption is that everything really starts earlier than you might think ...”