“... But for Britain’s antediluvian electoral system the House of Commons would now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and minutely studied by politicians, students of politics and Her Majesty the Queen – or at least by her advisers ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... so, despite the succeeding flurry of anti-sweatshop publicity, in which Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich also took part, it came as no surprise that, a year later, New York labour officials raided a sweatshop (producing Kathie Lee Gifford and other lines) that was paying workers less than the minimum wage. The garment industry’s darkest days are being ...”

“... opens with the appearance on the Spokane reservation of a thin old black man who calls himself Robert Johnson – presumably the great Thirties bluesman, long dead in the world outside Alexei’s fiction. Here he’s in flight from someone called ‘The Gentleman’, with whom he has done a deal that would make him the best guitar-player the world had ever ...”

“... war, but war no longer makes states the way it used to. There are now a growing number of what Robert Jackson has called ‘quasi-states’, organisations that are internationally recognised as ‘states’ yet fail to do the most elementary things states are supposed to do, such as maintaining order throughout a given territory. Today, such quasi-states ...”

“... misunderstood the conventions of exposition employed by the accused. The Nobel Prize physicist Robert Millikan has been accused of suppressing experiments which did not bear out his theory of the unitary charge on the electron, since his notebooks contain accounts of experiments he did not publish. It has been denied that this was an instance of deception ...”

“... international aspects of Stalin’s Communism? In his Foreword to the English-language edition, Robert Tucker, the American biographer of Stalin, argues that the letters ‘bear out the proposition ... that Stalin was a Russian imperial Bolshevik for whom the further progress of the international Communist revolution and the territorial expansion of Soviet ...”

“... and with the sharpest eye in the business for the tricks of the capitalists. The publication of Robert Gildea’s recent book, which successfully weaves the strands of scientific, cultural and economic developments into a political and military narrative, and of Gerald Newman’s unfamiliar case for the growth of an English nationalist culture from ...”

“... candidate for the position of staff counsel to McCarthy’s investigating committee. His rival was Robert F. Kennedy, whose father and older brother were McCarthy supporters. These two intensely ambitious and utterly ruthless young men, as alike as peas in a pod, hated each other. Their rivalry ended only with Bobby’s death. Cohn got the much sought-after ...”

“... Recent years have also seen two outstanding single-country studies of the 19th-century duel: Robert Nye’s Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France nicely complements Ute Frevert’s Ehrenmänner (‘Men of Honour’) of 1991, a book that is close in subject-matter – although not in interpretation – to the one reviewed here. The duel ...”

“... Without the refugees from Nazi Europe American intellectual life would lack weight and reach. It is impossible to conceive of American political thought without Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss; American psychoanalysis without Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim or Heinz Hartmann; American publishing without Kurt Wolff or Theodore Schocken; architecture without Walter Gropius; art history without Erwin Panofsky; mathematics without Kurt Gödel; physics without Enrico Fermi – and the list goes on and on ...”

“... be homeless in New York.’ The chaplain from Catch-22 reappears, his name strangely changed from Robert Oliver Shipman to Albert Taylor Tappman, but complete with a close to verbatim quotation from the earlier book about his fantasies of the harm that could come to his family. He is still helpless and well-meaning. Here as in Catch-22, ‘immoral logic ...”

“... Convention of 1907. Francis Younghusband was more or less born into the Great Game. His uncle was Robert Shaw, British Political Agent in Yarkand; his father was John Younghusband, Inspector-General of Police in the Punjab, and occasional lecturer on the Russian menace. At school at Clifton, his great friend was Henry Newbolt (‘The sand of the desert is ...”

“... flamboyant John Elliotson’, ‘the one-eyed, gold-waistcoated, civic-skewering Robert Knox’, ‘the humane mad-doctor John Conolly’, ‘the bombastic Ernst Haeckel’. If Desmond gave us time to think about it, one might wonder whether ‘civic-skewering’ is a branch of anatomy (Knox was Burke and Hare’s main customer) or of social ...”

“... for constructing such a complex urban environment. He was fortunate to find early masters, Robert Foote and then John Baird, and in all likelihood they introduced the aspiring architect to the ideas that were to transform his art and profession: historicism and comparative architectural history. In the years of Thomson’s apprenticeships in the ...”