“... enormously to Gable’s individuality, but plays havoc for ever after with the moment when he’s frank with Vivian Leigh. You could argue that our tendency to demand when as soon as we think if has been responsible for the development of civilisation, and I daresay there are those who admire the first hominid who looked at a rock and saw a tool in it, but ...”

“... and people’s local interests in order to make a lot of money’. Other protesters appealed to Robert Runcie, whose pronouncements about the reckless pursuit of profit in the inner cities had so annoyed Mrs Thatcher. Runcie concluded that the Ashford development was ‘the price we have to pay for economic expansion’. The good Christians and Tories of ...”

“... from the vile calumnies fathered on her grandson Claudius by the fecund imagination of the late Robert Graves, itself infected by the most scurrilous rumour-mongers of Ancient Rome’. Unfortunately, the great lady seems rather boring, rather wordy, in Massie’s rehabilitation, and Augustus seems less concerned with her than with exciting memories of a ...”

“... stayed in an apartment overlooking the beach. ‘It is such a wonderful apartment,’ she wrote to Robert Lowell in 1958, that we’ll never rent it again, no matter what heights rents soar to, I think. Top floor, 11th, a terrace around two sides, overlooking all that famous bay and beach. Ships go by all the time, like targets in a shooting gallery, people ...”

“... from the story ‘Natural Colour’ (1998). ‘Driving back from taking the babysitter home, Frank would pass darkened houses where husbands he knew were lying in bed, head to murmuring head, with wives he coveted.’ Wood comments: ‘One relishes the kitschy way that adjective “murmuring” strives to raise the sentence’s tone, plump its cushion a ...”

“... 1858. His father was a sculptor and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist. The stories contained in his book Romantic Tales from the Punjab, were, he said, of the ‘highest possible antiquity, being ...”

“... But the black, often smudged charcoals better convey what is depicted: those incinerated buildings.Frank Auerbach was one of Bomberg’s pupils, and like him was much taken by the bombed craters and building sites he saw on Oxford Street and along the Thames in the 1950s. The Courtauld held an exhibition of Auerbach’s images of bombed London fifteen years ...”

“... Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She was influenced by the work of the American painter Robert Henri, who had founded the Ashcan School – a movement that championed gritty depictions of urban scenes. ‘I didn’t want to be taught Impressionism,’ Neel explained. ‘I didn’t see life as Picnic on the Grass. I wasn’t happy like Renoir.’ Her ...”

“... who had let it be understood that he was one of those hard-riding gentlemen like Major Robert Gregory, celebrated by Yeats for riding a race without a bit. He no sooner mounted his small beast than it reared and slowly bolted, dumping him onto the desert. Later I was told that this accident was more likely to happen to an experienced rider than to ...”

“... interested in exploring this now apparently pivotal aspect of Anglo-Irish relations will find Robert Fisk’s book both absorbing and provocative. Subtitled ‘Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality’, it begins its main narrative in 1938, with a brief look back to 1921, when the British military authorities insisted on the retention of the ...”

“... of ordnance in Aideed’s yard was firmly told to forget about it. (His discovery occurred as Robert Oakley, the President’s special representative, was wheedling Aideed and his enemy Ali Mahdi Mohamed into a hug opportunity for the cameras.) Any questions about disarmament have been met by the commanders of Operation Restore Hope with an insouciant ...”

“... take care to establish the way its main character speaks before his stroke. We’re introduced to Robert ‘Doc’ Wright in Antarctica, where he works for several months each year as a technical assistant and guide to geographical researchers. The first thing we hear from him is a phatic murmur delivered into a faulty radio: ‘Thomas? Luke? Come in? This is ...”

“... French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country. As Robert Gildea explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance. According to the Gaullist narrative, France went to war in 1939 ...”

“... a cartoon version of what Philip Roth called ‘the indigenous American berserk’. The hero of J. Robert Lennon’s fourth novel is a postal carrier, a loner in late middle age, moderately disgruntled, deranged to an uncertain extent – raising concerns that he will storm his place of work with a shotgun before the novel is through. But Albert Lippincott ...”

“... Caroline Blackwood’s first novel, was published when she was 44 and married to Robert Lowell. The seven years they spent together transformed her from an occasional magazine writer to a committed littérateur, a vindication of many years in the role of aristocratic playgirl, trophy wife and muse. She hailed from ‘the insular world of the ...”