“... that his readers read; who steps out of one story and into the next with side-glances at poems by Robert Frost, or who decorates a laconic recital (called ‘Moving the tables’) with parodic swatches of Hemingwayese. The verbal sportiveness can become obtrusive, but one accepts it as a token or offshoot of the creative energies of a very gifted ...”

“... and behaviour in these matters greatly offended the susceptibilities of the chivalrous young Robert Bridges, who from then on avoided him. And yet there is a curious resemblance between the pattern of Butler’s behaviour and that of the exponents of courtly love in the Middle Ages: the same rigid separation between sex, on the one hand, and ...”

“... Marchioness of Londonderry, refer not to her, but to Frances Anne, while Walter Long appears as Robert. The Chartwell Papers are continually cited for quotations which appear in full in the Randolph Churchill/Martin Gilbert companion volumes, or even in the main volumes themselves. This unhelpful practice has been made positively misleading, since, for a ...”

“... the experience in one of the styles patented by Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Robert Byron. The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have a sufficiently ...”

“... with their scripts. It was probably a mistake to employ stars like Al Pacino (Revolution) and Robert de Niro (The Mission): they are not only expensive in themselves, they make everything else expensive, since nothing around them can be cheap. It was certainly a mistake for Goldcrest to get so deep into television, out of which it made only losses. This ...”

“... to many aspiring Ruskin scholars, is British, but his teaching has not been in a university. Robert Hewison, one of the driving forces behind the revival that dates from the foundation of the Ruskin Association in 1969, has always steered clear of an academic career. So has Tim Hilton, whose biography of Ruskin’s early years (published in 1985) offers ...”

“... having one-fourth or more Indian blood’.) In his Destruction of the Californian Indians Robert Heizer reckons that between 1850 and 1863 some ten thousand Indians were indentured (made slaves, that is) or sold. In 1971 Heizer and Alan Almquist published three pages of Slave records from the Eureka courthouse in Humboldt county, Northern ...”

“... that sceptically. As to Sir Geoffrey: Engels described the statesman-like posture adopted by Sir Robert Peel after his fall in 1846 as the ‘mere souvenir of a Party man’, and that is how we should regard Sir Geoffrey’s defence. As to Mrs Thatcher: she is altogether a more substantial figure, but we should see in her career, not a ‘cure’ of the ...”

“... prizes the Oedipus complex. It would, wouldn’t it? Blake’s cultivation of his brother Robert was, apparently, ‘his most sustained and successful piece of Oedipal insubordination’, a means of ‘displacing his parents – particularly his father’. Aren’t the poems full of oppressive fathers, from Tiriel to Nobodaddy? ‘William’s poems ...”

“... and of reconstructions-from-afar is evoked in the novel’s epigraph from the famously unsettled Robert Louis Stevenson: The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allmuir, Or steep Caerketton; dreaming gaze again.                         Songs of Travel This is the nature of the voyage for the Scots on ...”

“... Isn’t this central rather than cunning? ‘Somehow never wrote something to go back to,’ wrote Robert Lowell gloomily (and unfairly) in his poem ‘Reading Myself’. Does Carter give us something to go back to? Tolstoy’s late parables coerce us, of course; but they also touch our lives with what Henry James, in his Notebooks, called ‘something ...”

“... flamboyant John Elliotson’, ‘the one-eyed, gold-waistcoated, civic-skewering Robert Knox’, ‘the humane mad-doctor John Conolly’, ‘the bombastic Ernst Haeckel’. If Desmond gave us time to think about it, one might wonder whether ‘civic-skewering’ is a branch of anatomy (Knox was Burke and Hare’s main customer) or of social ...”

“... Recent years have also seen two outstanding single-country studies of the 19th-century duel: Robert Nye’s Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France nicely complements Ute Frevert’s Ehrenmänner (‘Men of Honour’) of 1991, a book that is close in subject-matter – although not in interpretation – to the one reviewed here. The duel ...”

“... Without the refugees from Nazi Europe American intellectual life would lack weight and reach. It is impossible to conceive of American political thought without Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss; American psychoanalysis without Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim or Heinz Hartmann; American publishing without Kurt Wolff or Theodore Schocken; architecture without Walter Gropius; art history without Erwin Panofsky; mathematics without Kurt Gödel; physics without Enrico Fermi – and the list goes on and on ...”

“... Convention of 1907. Francis Younghusband was more or less born into the Great Game. His uncle was Robert Shaw, British Political Agent in Yarkand; his father was John Younghusband, Inspector-General of Police in the Punjab, and occasional lecturer on the Russian menace. At school at Clifton, his great friend was Henry Newbolt (‘The sand of the desert is ...”