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“... 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 ...”

“... route, Peter Redgrove has arrived back at a very ancient place: or at any rate, a place that Robert Graves unearthed in The White Goddess and would have us believe is ancient. Graves is probably right: but it is best to approach enchanted ground, as he himself does, doubly armed, with red thread around a rowan twig and a pinch of scepticism. What is ...”

“... of recent philosophical writers in this area whose achievement Dr Küng feels free to overlook: Robert M. Adams, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Terence Penelhum, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross and Richard Swinburne, for example, have all made contributions far too substantial to be thus ignored. Dr Küng’s enormous apparatus of bibliography and references gives ...”

“... were more and more professionally organised, and more and more separate from their public. Robert Peel complained in the 1840s about the difficulty of justifying government support for astronomy to a Parliament of country gentlemen. Science was specialised, divided, demarcated. At the same time Peel’s problems could have been solved by keeping the ...”

“... record. By 1895, the Liberal majority had faded, though Labour rivalry still counted for little. Robert Holt, the Liberal leader, withdrew from active politics. He was the only man to refuse a baronetcy after his appointment had been already gazetted and thus ensured that his refusal, too, had to be publicly announced. Holt also deserves a mention as the ...”

“... The history of modern Britain is to a considerable degree the history of the Tory Party, Europe’s – and perhaps the world’s – oldest political party. Or at least the equal oldest party, since it is unusual for the supporters of the status quo to initiate partisan politics. Conservative politics are reactive, a poor second best to the conservative’s preferred condition, one of no politics at all ...”

“... a perfect crocodile; no allegory of a whale expelled from a whaley Eden. One may sympathise with Robert Blatchford, a dogged point-by-point rationalist, confronted in controversy by this power to pack an entire theology into a single escape of freakish wit. ‘A real life of anybody is a very difficult thing to write,’ Chesterton says in the ...”

“... of ‘place’ in expatriate writing. Did you know, for example, that what Americans take to be Robert Frost’s most characteristic evocations of his native scene – ‘Birches’, ‘Mending Wall’ and ‘After Apple Picking’ – were written in Old England, not New? Or that Stephen Crane’s ‘The bride comes to Yellow Sky’ and ‘The Blue ...”

“... Self-conscious attempts to record talk only wreck its spontaneity. In Genius in the Drawing-Room Robert Rosenstone’s essay describes the New York salon of Mabel Dodge which ran (if that’s what salons do) from 1912 to 1914 and was ‘the most famous, and no doubt the most interesting salon in American history’. Mabel Dodge liked to assemble celebrities ...”

“... 1950s, though seldom or never so well as by MacCaig, the mode went decisively out of fashion when Robert Lowell, bell-wether of the Anglo-American flock, repudiated it for his Life Studies (1955). MacCaig no doubt, sensing which way the wind was blowing, dismantled the admittedly cumbrous machinery of such writing so as to fall into line with the more ...”