“... all as Augustinian as one another. If Cohen’s utopia is unrealistic, so at the opposite pole is Robert Nozick’s in his Anarchy, State and Utopia, where overriding priority is given to individual liberty, and social justice is a matter entirely of process rather than outcome. But such a society would easily give rise to inequalities which nobody on either ...”

“... Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia’s self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second edition of his book Mill and Liberalism (1963), he remembered with delight that one of its original reviewers had ‘obligingly’ described it as ‘“dangerous and unpleasant”, which was what it was intended to be ...”

“... its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson loved more than any other: ‘The Birks of ...”

“... was a Proustian condition: in New Mecca, New Babylon, a history of Russian émigrés in France, Robert Johnston describes the way Russian participants at a 1930 session of the Studio Franco-Russe said they felt ‘condemned to a Proustian existence’, an existence ‘as passive and contemplative of life as Proust’. Gazdanov said that his was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and ...”

“... calls one chapter ‘The Forgotten Bestsellers of Early English Fiction’, with a glance at Robert Darnton’s Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, but in a spirit of grim retrieval instead of heartfelt recuperation. The thriving subgenre of ‘ramble novels’ with titles like Adventures of a Rake and Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse has ...”

“... undemanding relationship with her erstwhile husband than of the ungovernable passion she felt for Robert. He rather relied on this passion keeping their marriage on more placid and companionable lines. When Tory worries about her son at boarding school, Bertram suggests they call the matron. ‘That “we” took a great burden from her. For so long she had ...”

“... than reverential. Piper’s heyday coincided with that of Ealing Studios; indeed, his posters for Robert Hamer’s Pink String and Sealing Wax and Charles Crichton’s Painted Boats were demonstratively appropriate, though Googie Withers dolled up like a Staffordshire figure in front of a spread of Kemp Town Georgian exerted rather more box office pull than ...”

“... humiliators rather than the humiliated, to ‘convert trauma into triumph’ (in the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller’s terms), to transform the trauma of vulnerability into the triumph of omnipotent control, the trauma of being a child into the false triumph of being an adult. The child as abject supplicant becomes the adult as arrogant sadist. In other words ...”

“... Other club members preferred less gruesome explanations for the playwright’s brilliance. Robert Folkestone Williams, later to write a trilogy of biographical novels about Shakespeare – Shakespeare and His Friends, The Youth of Shakespeare and The Secret Passion – reverts to a less elaborate version of the Ovid-goes-to-Stratford manner in ‘A ...”

“... some curators in Europe. At the beginning of the practice known as ‘institutional critique’, Robert Smithson insisted that the artist must understand the apparatus he or she is ‘threaded through’ in order to challenge, if not to change, its operations. Today many artists are only too happy to be so threaded, and many curators only too eager to do the ...”

“... Robert Frost’s crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets everywhere. His whodunnit La Disparition (1969), a lipogram, was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994 ...”

“... He served as the director of the Theoretical Division at wartime Los Alamos, reporting directly to Robert Oppenheimer. After the war, he returned to Cornell, but he remained active as a consultant to the nuclear weapons programme, as well as to the budding nuclear power industry. In 1947, Bethe was asked to tackle the problem of shielding for nuclear ...”

“... who have conventionally been regarded, with Suckling and Carew, as principal ‘Cavalier’ poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for regicide, doing in the book? Why do we ...”