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“... 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 ...”

“... remote from political reality – this is his verdict on the contemporary works by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Thus liberalism as a stance is liable to a variety of unsatisfactory oscillations and instabilities. Yet what alternatives are there? Dunn is ruthless, and rightly so, with Marxism and any other contemporary doctrine of revolution. This is not just ...”

“... they call them forces.’ Leibniz feared lest Newton’s theory would revive the philosophy of Robert Fludd, against whom Mersenne and Gassendi had first defended the mechanical philosophy. Hall leaves open the questions ‘whether one views the Newtonian point of view as consistent with a then normal Christian view of God’s purpose or (with Leibniz) as ...”

“... yawning fissures left by Sassoon and Owen and Graves. But from the Laureate none was forthcoming. Robert Bridges was too aggressively uncommitted, and perhaps too honest a poet, to do the right thing. (When he went to the Palace in 1913 to receive the office he snapped at Lord Stamfordham, who was in attendance, ‘I don’t want any of your Stars and ...”

“... assistant curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’ doesn’t tell us why he is not a painter, but ...”

“... studies of other cultures. Lloyd’s paper on right and left in Greek philosophy was inspired by Robert Hertz’s anthropological work on the distinction. Today, when far more Classical scholars are aware of work in the social sciences, and when, since the mid-Seventies, it has even been possible to take a first degree in Ancient History and Social ...”

“... cheeks in the hope that he might open his eyes for a moment and say hello or goodbye’ – about Robert Graves in Majorca, and about an old lady singing: Forty-four and forty-five Am I dead or am 1 alive? I know but I don’t care. I know about despair. This intensely personal structure of image and reference ensures that Blackburn is always present in her ...”

“... the sake of plain speaking, the account Suetonius gives of Tiberius’s goatish habits on Capri; Robert Graves’s translation is sufficiently graphic for most tastes. The Middle Ages and Renaissance pass with incomprehensible anecdotes about lusty millers, many pages of Rabelais, Aretino’s account of a gang-bang. There is the odd snippet of useful ...”

“... truth Mendacious by default. The phrase was invented, and its applications demonstrated, by Sir Robert Armstrong (now Lord Armstrong), Secretary to the [British] Cabinet and Head of the Secret Service, who when called as a witness in an Australian court, in the course of the so-called ‘Spycatcher’ trial, would not admit to lying, but cheerfully ...”

“... richer, more intimate affair than, say, proportional representation; but the post-colonial critic Robert Young has recently reminded us of just what racist, imperial baggage this apparently suggestive notion carries with it from the anthropologising 19th century. Jacqueline Rose has her own suspicions of that brand of literary politics for which culture is ...”