“... Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript collections. The flames from a fireplace had caught on the wooden mantelpiece and spread to the wainscoting. Hapless librarians were throwing water on the blaze; the city fire engines were nowhere to ...”

“... William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try to blackmail Nixon, as he had blackmailed other Presidents, because of the wiretap ...”

“... relationships preserved, disputes prevented, standards upheld. ‘Over our community,’ wrote Robert Roberts of the Edwardian Salford slum, ‘the matriarchs stood guardians, but not creators, of the group conscience and as such possessed a sense of social propriety as developed and unerring as any clique of Edwardian dowagers.’ It was the same at the ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”

“... Keats walked this coast he felt it followed him,’ I said. But our plans involved Robert Burns. Karl, since he first began publishing Seamus in the New Statesman in the 1960s, always felt there was a clear affinity between Burns and Heaney. They were both the sons of farmers and they both allowed nature to oxygenate the mind and inflect the ...”

“... Florence Carrez, played the title role in Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, the classic film made by Robert Bresson in 1962; Delay became a writer not long after her role in Bresson’s film, and is now an académicienne. She drew attention to Péguy’s dream of fusing faith, hope and charity with the three Republican virtues in order to establish a universal ...”

“... vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some compelling evidence of contacts between Trump’s people and various Russians. It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a ...”

“... notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s urging. Almost certainly, after the Spanish Civil War, he seemed to ...”

“... later reflected, that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played ...”

“... are audibly mapped.There are also thousands of memorable moments, some distinguished by hindsight (Robert Maxwell declaring: ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it’), some by the way radio forefronts every tic, hesitation and obfuscation, and some by personal revelation. In 2020, as Covid added a piquancy to the ...”

“... via the New Yorkers, to strike a chord with a younger generation of poets such as John Forbes, Robert Adamson and John Tranter, who included the entire sequence in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (co-edited with Philip Mead) published last year. In their introduction to the volume they argue that ‘these unsettling works of the imagination ...”

“... did not ideally suit him to army life. Nor did things improve when his friend Major-General Sir Robert Laycock arranged for his transfer from the Commandos to the Guards. If anything, his time in the Guards was even less happy than his spell as a Marine. When his superior officer, Lord Lovat, who had seen him drunk in the bar at White’s every day of the ...”

“... don’t make the house, or the grey-green ice, any less real. History gnaws. History shat on Robert, the older twin by ten minutes. I want, he said in a foolish bloodthirsty dialectical moment, to see the blood of social change swirl around my ankles. Standing at the back of a crowd listening to a speaker at the Karl Marx Hof, he was trampled to death ...”

“... writing: in addition to sermons preached by others, there were the law lectures ascribed to Robert Chambers, the parliamentary debates he ‘altered and disguised’ from others’ notes and published as ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and the ‘Last Solemn Declaration’ of Dr Dodd, the ‘macaroni parson’, who ...”

“... it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert Dodsley recommended memorising it as an exercise in mental self-training. In Derzhypilsky’s production, having been performed beautifully in its familiar Q2 position in the third act, the soliloquy got an encore at the end of Act V when Hamlet, still not ...”