“... hold their brothers cheap.’ An accomplished sonneteer, Cullen was a devotee of Keats, but as Robert Hillyer, who taught him during his brief stay at Harvard, made clear, Cullen experimented with a range of forms and published the results in Copper Sun. In his book In Pursuit of Poetry Hillyer wrote: ‘There they all are, ballad stanzas, heroic ...”

“... Lester Winter, a ‘polished, worldly, well-groomed’ young man who introduced him to the work of Robert Frost and Edna St Vincent Millay. Winter planned to become a dentist but had artistic aspirations too, and liked disparaging his family as avaricious philistines (his father was a successful dry-goods merchant). He valued Roth’s immigrant ...”

“... conservative Midwestern town, but there is no follow-up on this broad hint. The youngest brother, Robert, stayed in Ohio. James described him as a ‘Babbitt’ – a smug materialist. He too was a published author, though his book was called The Successful High School Athletic Programme. Purdy remarked that if Robert or ...”

“... civil-society theorists about the inevitability of the break-up of the Soviet empire in 1989, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone warned of the dire consequences for the political culture of the United States of failing to nourish similar voluntary forms of civic participation. Kwon applauds the creation of an ‘ethical horizon of human solidarity beyond the ...”

“... gangsters were left – and because this book draws its own line at 1948 we get too little of Robert Stroud (the ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’, portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the film of the same name), the prisoner who made the most of his incarceration. There would be one more escape, in 1960. Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, Clarence and John, got ...”

“... undemanding relationship with her erstwhile husband than of the ungovernable passion she felt for Robert. He rather relied on this passion keeping their marriage on more placid and companionable lines. When Tory worries about her son at boarding school, Bertram suggests they call the matron. ‘That “we” took a great burden from her. For so long she had ...”

“... than reverential. Piper’s heyday coincided with that of Ealing Studios; indeed, his posters for Robert Hamer’s Pink String and Sealing Wax and Charles Crichton’s Painted Boats were demonstratively appropriate, though Googie Withers dolled up like a Staffordshire figure in front of a spread of Kemp Town Georgian exerted rather more box office pull than ...”

“... and collecting books; hers were travel, hunting and the theatre. The man who shared her tastes was Robert Dudley, with whom she enjoyed the main emotional relationship of her adult years. Much of the celebrated rivalry between Cecil and Dudley grew out of jealousy on Cecil’s part and his ill-suppressed belief that Dudley was a bad influence. What Cecil and ...”

“... is being used to pave the way for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. Meanwhile, in Britain, Robert Bittlestone has recently argued that Odysseus’ homeland is not modern Ithaki, but the peninsula of Paliki, now attached to Kefalonia, but once, he claims, a separate island. Geologists may manage to prove that Paliki was once detached from Kefalonia, but ...”

“... was a Proustian condition: in New Mecca, New Babylon, a history of Russian émigrés in France, Robert Johnston describes the way Russian participants at a 1930 session of the Studio Franco-Russe said they felt ‘condemned to a Proustian existence’, an existence ‘as passive and contemplative of life as Proust’. Gazdanov said that his was ...”

“... Other club members preferred less gruesome explanations for the playwright’s brilliance. Robert Folkestone Williams, later to write a trilogy of biographical novels about Shakespeare – Shakespeare and His Friends, The Youth of Shakespeare and The Secret Passion – reverts to a less elaborate version of the Ovid-goes-to-Stratford manner in ‘A ...”

“... its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson loved more than any other: ‘The Birks of ...”

“... page’. And often news circulated by word of mouth ‘at third or fourth hand’, which is how Robert Chambers, the publisher and scientist, remembered his wartime boyhood in Peebles in the Scottish Borders. News experienced as rumour, Chambers recollected, was filtered through the vagaries of local life and the eclecticism of popular reading habits. An ...”

“... some curators in Europe. At the beginning of the practice known as ‘institutional critique’, Robert Smithson insisted that the artist must understand the apparatus he or she is ‘threaded through’ in order to challenge, if not to change, its operations. Today many artists are only too happy to be so threaded, and many curators only too eager to do the ...”

“... all as Augustinian as one another. If Cohen’s utopia is unrealistic, so at the opposite pole is Robert Nozick’s in his Anarchy, State and Utopia, where overriding priority is given to individual liberty, and social justice is a matter entirely of process rather than outcome. But such a society would easily give rise to inequalities which nobody on either ...”