“... the inevitably rather solemn, because systematic, nonsense of E.L.T. Mesens, Benjamin Péret or Robert Desnos and a well-known jingle like this by Harry Graham (1874-1936)? I was playing golf the day    That the Germans landed; All our troops had run away,    All our ships were stranded; And the thought of England’s shame Altogether spoilt my ...”

“... so, despite the succeeding flurry of anti-sweatshop publicity, in which Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich also took part, it came as no surprise that, a year later, New York labour officials raided a sweatshop (producing Kathie Lee Gifford and other lines) that was paying workers less than the minimum wage. The garment industry’s darkest days are being ...”

“... war, but war no longer makes states the way it used to. There are now a growing number of what Robert Jackson has called ‘quasi-states’, organisations that are internationally recognised as ‘states’ yet fail to do the most elementary things states are supposed to do, such as maintaining order throughout a given territory. Today, such quasi-states ...”

“... policy, healthily excited by the new, politically and socially aware, but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities ...”

“... of, the Times on seven other pages. The Sunday Times features on six pages. The Times columnist Robert Harris gets two entries compared to Germaine Greer’s one, Gandhi’s one, or Mandela’s one. Noam Chomsky: nil. E.P Thompson: nil. The Times columnist Bernard Levin: two. Levin deserves a special mention. In the Times in May 1996, he implied that ...”

“... Germany and the Americas; its characters a Croatian Catholic priest called Draganovic and Major Robert d’Aubuisson of Salvador. If British involvement and documentation seem minimal, this may simply be because that famous repository of guilty secrets, the Foreign Office, ‘deliberated for six months, then announced that no papers would be released, on ...”

“... when he first comes into certain view (apart from the record of his marriage), in the employ of Robert Cecil, laying out new grounds for the recently-acquired Hatfield House, his reputation was already such as to enable him to move even in court circles. Ten years later we find him investing in the Virginia Company and, a year after that, sailing with a ...”

“... Just the place for a snark, the Bellman said. And with equal assurance, political activists from Tom Paine to Friedrich Engels and historians from Elie Halévy to Edward Thompson have hailed 18th and 19th-century Britain as just the place for a revolution. For superficially – though only superficially – the conditions seem to have been almost ideal ...”

“... of curiosity: historical, technical, geographical. The result falls short of the masterpiece that Robert Penn Warren hails on the jacket. It needs a bigger and better-stocked mind to carry the reader from one individually satisfying sketch to another over such a long span. But for a writer’s first published book it is a formidable achievement, combining the ...”

“... But for Britain’s antediluvian electoral system the House of Commons would now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and minutely studied by politicians, students of politics and Her Majesty the Queen – or at least by her advisers ...”

“... representation of the class struggle in Medieval Europe. Meanwhile the poems of a second Scotsman, Robert Burns, are better-known in Russia than in his native Scotland – and for reasons that go beyond ideology. Burns’s language, somewhat difficult to understand in the original, has been beautifully rendered into lucid conversational Russian verse by Samuel ...”

“... of America, a man called Tom Clausen, lurks in the background. Since he has now taken over from Robert McNamara as chief of the World Bank, he would almost certainly have taken a more prominent role in Sampson’s book but for one thing: he was the only top banker who could not find time to see Sampson – an extraordinary decision for a man who told the ...”

“... from the ashes of her life in Africa, to reappear in the guise of Isak Dinesen in America. Robert Haas, after a year’s deliberation, decided to go ahead with the publication, in New York, of Seven Gothic Tales. Putnam, the English publishers, had rejected the manuscript without even reading it. Haas had taken a gamble. In the event, Seven Gothic ...”

“... The heavenly ruler looked down, noted the inadequacy of Giotto and his successors and decided to dispatch Michelangelo to earth, there to demonstrate perfection in no fewer than four arts (drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture) and thus redeem mankind from errors of taste. So runs the exordium of Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Michelangelo. It would not surprise me if Vasari got this conceit from the source that provided much of his biographical information – namely, Michelangelo ...”

“... If you want to get ahead in the world, you cannot afford to be contemptuous of or ironic about your own fantasies. It is indeed important to be able, as Wordsworth puts it,                                         to part Vague longing that is bred by want of power From paramount impulse not to be withstood. Yet the poet’s phrasing implicitly suggests that what finally matters is not the nature of the things we long for, but the intensity and the confidence with which we long for them, and the place we assign to our longings within our deepest conceptions of ourselves ...”