“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”