“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that Darling seems most alive. ‘When Darling entered a room, men stood,’ the playwright Robert Patrick said. ‘They instinctively stood in the presence of the goddess. Before she opened her mouth and started the Candy craziness, she projected a real movie star effect. Aristocratic. Ladylike.’ It would be naive to think that a woman who spent time ...”

“... New York found the place almost monastic. Leary loved to turn people on, with various results. Robert Lowell, for example, seems to have felt uncomfortable. There are some scary bits, in Flashbacks, that force one to admire the recklessness of Leary. The hidden presence of the CIA is menacing, as was (and no doubt is) the extent of the Agency’s interest ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... greatest hits from recent historical writing are converted into Post-Modernists – Simon Schama, Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis and Orlando Figes. But Evans never cites an instance of these authors even borrowing the Post-Modernist label, let alone one showing that they conceive of themselves as working on behalf of an intellectual cause known as ...”

“... like Reuchlin, Muenster and Luther. Even in England, that Renaissance backwater, men and women – Robert Wakefield, William Tyndale and Lady Jane Grey – made the effort; and the man whose trail-blazing translation of the New Testament from its original Greek had paved the way for the Reformation ought logically to have done the same with me Old ...”

“... and still enjoying the fruits of despotism. The most recent victim of his political guile was Robert Gelbard, the American envoy to the former Yugoslavia. The primary goal of American policy in the Balkans at present is to secure a withdrawal of US ground troops from Bosnia at the earliest possible date. The prospect of a more stable Bosnia was given an ...”

“... drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools?’ Ian Hamilton, the author of a fine biography of Robert Lowell, has made himself a connoisseur of the pitfalls of biography since the frustrations of his search for J.D. Salinger. In Keepers of the Flame (1992) he surveyed the legal and practical impediments: the prophylactic bonfire, the deathbed ...”

“... Labour MPs who recently confessed that the main intellectual influence in their lives had been Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists could well move on to more strenuous engagement with some of the problems posed by the works of Baroness Wootton. One of the most interesting of those problems – and one which she constantly hinted at, but ...”

“... inventive descriptions of her own life, she delivered exhaustive accounts of novels such as Robert Hichens’s Bella Donna, Eden Philpott’s The Secret Woman and W.B. Maxwell’s The Guarded Flame. These fictions featured buccaneers with bull-like necks, Nubian singers and baskets of snakes, ‘intensely masculine’ counts and women with flower-like ...”

“... who might be a mole’. Failing to land a job on the Daily Worker he went to Tribune, where Robert Edwards was leaving to join Beaverbrook and Michael Foot, recently a Beaverbrook man, was acting editor. (Will Mervyn Jones also end up in the Beaverbrook stable? the reader anxiously wonders.) Tribune paid him £16 a week to spread himself over the paper ...”

“... signalled his intentions to his far-flung sublunar creatures. No need for poets then to ask, with Robert Frost, whether design governed in so small a thing as a royal bastard’s rebellion or a reflagged Kuwaiti oil ship. In fact, neither Lilly nor Ashmole would have needed to wonder whether such seemingly minor events might escalate into large and then ...”