“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... writes as pungently as anyone in modern journalism, but he has a weekly column to sustain, and Robert Maxwell is by no means as anxious about the fate of the Belgrano as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the experience in one of the styles patented by Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Robert Byron. The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have a sufficiently ...”

“... sight of something by the shore of the lake: turtles waddling in to end the story in the manner of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ or Tobias Wolff’s ‘Poaching’: ‘They watch those turtles on their slow march and behold those ancient creatures, shell-backed and the colour of time, as they lower themselves, turtle upon turtle, disappearing into the ...”