“... 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 ...”

“... In a letter to Cyril Connolly in 1948 Evelyn Waugh listed the ideas that had been in his mind when he was at work on The Loved One: immediately after ‘over-excitement with the scene at Forest Lawn’ came ‘The Anglo-American impasse. Never the twain shall meet.’ Not a new thought even thirty years ago, but, though we may run into one another occasionally in the corridors of the Humanity Research Center of the University of Texas (their territory), or share a train compartment on the way to Combe Florey (ours), it still holds good for those in the Waugh industry ...”

“... The author does not join in the volley of execration justifiably aimed by historians such as Robert Paxton and Pascal Ory at those anti-semitic policies of the regime which at first anticipated but later fell behind those of the Germans. He shows little real interest in the basic continuities, even though they demonstrate the remarkable vitality of the ...”

“... of an intermediary. (This surely was one function of his friendship with the ardent Schoenbergian Robert Craft – which Keller does not mention – a friendship which began three years before Schoenberg’s death.) Many perceptive observers will have taken it for granted that Webern acted as a kind of buffer between the two other composers, and will be ...”

“... Amusing, and perhaps instructive, to think of great paintings whose voyage into mystery and meaning seems to depend, in the first instance, on a technical trick: a separation of planes so that the head of the principal figure lives in a different world from that of the body, and the rest of the picture. Rembrandt’s ‘Polish Rider’ travels serenely on a pantomime horse, deftly accoutred with his bowcase, his shapka, his shapely uniform of red and white ...”

“... delighted the Sunday Mirror’s owner, the fervent Zionist, now resting on the Mount of Olives, Robert Maxwell. But it was quite false. The following Sunday, the Sunday Times published a six-thousand-word exclusive, starting on the front page. It was an excellent piece of journalism, awakening the world community for the first time to the fact that Israel ...”

“... of the captives of Lebanon, the George Harrison of the hostage scene, the other one. The reporter Robert Fisk has confessed to him how he failed to follow up a dubious tip-off about where he was being kept in 1988. When Keenan was held hostage in Beirut journalists found themselves asking what the story was. I am not referring to the international news splash ...”

“... experience, have learned something that you could bring to bear on a book about Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell and the media in the contemporary world. From your unique insight into tabloid sex scandals, you must, for instance, have noticed among last year’s crop at least two that stood out for their quintessentially Post-Modern character. One was the ...”

“... the wrong door, and gone to church instead of the movies. ‘It’s like a morality car wash,’ Robert De Niro says in voice-over, adding that Las Vegas is to Americans what Lourdes is to Europeans: a place where you look for miracles to take your pains and blemishes away. You dream of healing and you leave lots of money behind. Scorsese’s Casino is full ...”

“... public inebriation taboo. So it is in recent movies about Hollywood. Larry Levy, an executive in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), tells his rival Griffin Mill that ‘AA meetings are where the best deals are happening.’ The film follows Mill’s wandering but pin-sharp attention as he listens to increasingly bizarre ‘high concept’ story pitches in ...”

“... alienation, Jekyll-and-Hyde style. But that doubleness is not Barker’s point. It wasn’t really Robert Louis Stevenson’s either, perhaps – for poor old Jekyll speculates that the real horror he’s discovered is not that he is two, but that he is legion, many, the anonymous masses are living inside him. Ugh! This is what Barker wants Prior to be, the ...”

“... to save as many men as possible from the horrors of the ‘hand-made railway’. The admirable Dr Robert Hardie, who served in Changi gaol, wrote in The Burma-Siam Railway: ‘I used to think that after these experiences I would never be able to tell the truth plainly again.’ And so to that midnight hour in the guardroom, when Lieutenant Lomax removed his ...”

“... international aspects of Stalin’s Communism? In his Foreword to the English-language edition, Robert Tucker, the American biographer of Stalin, argues that the letters ‘bear out the proposition ... that Stalin was a Russian imperial Bolshevik for whom the further progress of the international Communist revolution and the territorial expansion of Soviet ...”

“... on, perhaps, the government could afford to be more conciliatory. The current Liberal regime of Robert Bourassa has toyed with proposals to soften the language laws, but has left them essentially unchanged in the interest of ‘social peace’ – fear of nationalist wrath if, for example, commercial signs in English were to be allowed. In recent years the ...”