“... of a long sequence of visitors, seeking some authenticity or purity not to be found elsewhere. Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran (1932) was a ‘decisive moment in the formulation of the Aran myth’, and the writings of Aran natives like Liam O’Flaherty and the Irish-language poet, the late Mairtin O’Diereain, have added further nuances and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to many aspiring Ruskin scholars, is British, but his teaching has not been in a university. Robert Hewison, one of the driving forces behind the revival that dates from the foundation of the Ruskin Association in 1969, has always steered clear of an academic career. So has Tim Hilton, whose biography of Ruskin’s early years (published in 1985) offers ...”

“... that his readers read; who steps out of one story and into the next with side-glances at poems by Robert Frost, or who decorates a laconic recital (called ‘Moving the tables’) with parodic swatches of Hemingwayese. The verbal sportiveness can become obtrusive, but one accepts it as a token or offshoot of the creative energies of a very gifted ...”

“... prizes the Oedipus complex. It would, wouldn’t it? Blake’s cultivation of his brother Robert was, apparently, ‘his most sustained and successful piece of Oedipal insubordination’, a means of ‘displacing his parents – particularly his father’. Aren’t the poems full of oppressive fathers, from Tiriel to Nobodaddy? ‘William’s poems ...”

“... and behaviour in these matters greatly offended the susceptibilities of the chivalrous young Robert Bridges, who from then on avoided him. And yet there is a curious resemblance between the pattern of Butler’s behaviour and that of the exponents of courtly love in the Middle Ages: the same rigid separation between sex, on the one hand, and ...”

“... having one-fourth or more Indian blood’.) In his Destruction of the Californian Indians Robert Heizer reckons that between 1850 and 1863 some ten thousand Indians were indentured (made slaves, that is) or sold. In 1971 Heizer and Alan Almquist published three pages of Slave records from the Eureka courthouse in Humboldt county, Northern ...”

“... that sceptically. As to Sir Geoffrey: Engels described the statesman-like posture adopted by Sir Robert Peel after his fall in 1846 as the ‘mere souvenir of a Party man’, and that is how we should regard Sir Geoffrey’s defence. As to Mrs Thatcher: she is altogether a more substantial figure, but we should see in her career, not a ‘cure’ of the ...”

“... expert advice and then ignored it. The head of Aids research in the US Army, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Redfield, told the conference that Aids had become the leading cause of death in the American Armed Forces. A priest who had Aids, John White, held up a banner during the conference which contained the words: ‘The Church has Aids.’ He was frogmarched ...”

“... should say that I have been a member of Fortnight’s advisory board for five years.) Robert Johnstone, who edited the anthology’s ‘Cultural World’ section of Troubled Times, describes Fortnight as originating in ‘dark days when publishing or anything mildly progressive culturally was a novelty in strife-stricken, bomb-blasted, war-weary ...”

“... 1949 and 1952 with Syria, Jordan and Egypt respectively. The title of the book, like the poem by Robert Frost which inspired it, is rather ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. Rabinovich declines to identify those who decided not to take the road towards peace. He may be intrigued by Frost’s suggestion that the choice when reaching the fork in the road ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a long and distinguished pedigree this analysis has. It is perhaps the most celebrated part of Robert Michels’s Political Parties (originally published in 1911) – ‘who says organisation says oligarchy’ – and self-recruiting oligarchies were, Michels believed, a tendency intrinsic to all modern democratic parties. Defeat from the Jaws of Victory ...”

“... and of reconstructions-from-afar is evoked in the novel’s epigraph from the famously unsettled Robert Louis Stevenson: The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allmuir, Or steep Caerketton; dreaming gaze again.                         Songs of Travel This is the nature of the voyage for the Scots on ...”