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“... truthful communication itself forfeits interest. The effect is oddly similar to the last poems of Robert Lowell, as if writing had become a habit quite lacking in relish, intensity or surprise. This strange American blight may, in both cases, be a deliberate effect: but if so, it is a dangerous tactic to adopt in a book of recollection. The reader is more ...”

“... With the virtual disappearance of the Jewish working class in the Diaspora, and the decline of the Labour movement in Israel, Jewish socialism is beginning to look historically limited, rather than an intrinsic part of a cultural heritage. The idea that the Jews are somehow natural radicals by virtue of their internationalism, messianism and inherited ethic of social justice does not stand up to scrutiny ...”

“... on one of the compendious alibis put forward in extenuation of Eden by his faithful biographer, Robert Rhodes James. Why, then, by 1951, had Lloyd risen so high in the Conservative Party, to which he had only finally committed himself as late as 1944? One explanation is that he had a good war behind him. He was one of the ‘Tory Brigadiers’ elected in ...”

“... happened to bump into’ (and the confusions of fiction and reality are not helped when Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a source for the figure of Charlus, turns up as ‘Montesquieu’). Nabokov is more interestingly considered, on the subject of cruelty: more interestingly, because there is here, more than in other parts of the book, a sense of felt ...”

“... receptive to fundamentalist Christianity, and (if the recent Soviet invitation to televangelist Robert Schuller is anything to go by) the satellite channels of a united Europe may one day broadcast the gospel of individual salvation which its inhabitants have long thought fit only for their American cousins. It is worth remembering that the social evolution ...”

“... Among the Bechuanas it is a rule ... The Borero Indians of Brazil think ... The Huichol Indians admire ... In some parts of Melanesia ...’ And in Bangkok at 12 o’clock? It needs an effort of imagination to think of Noel Coward reading The Golden Bough (popular abridged edition, 1922), but he catches perfectly the scatter-effect of Late Victorian and Edwardian anthopology practised according to the comparative method, above all by Frazer, from whose legendary notebooks the examples rattled in promiscuous handfuls onto the page: Melanesians and Eskimos, Breton peasants, Astarte and Cybele, corn dollies and Balder the Beautiful, the absurd beliefs of the Wawamba, the atrocious behaviour of the Mura-muras ...”

“... by causing readers to think less of his character (as readers may have been led to think less of Robert Frost), but simply by deflecting the focus of people’s attention. Rereading Cheever, it’s hard now not to be on the qui vive for signs of how his complicated, compulsively deceiving sexuality enters the texture of his work: at the time of the ...”

“... most obvious of which is the absence of any sympathetic Jewish characters. The editor of Quadrant, Robert Manne, summed it up when he said that the novel appeared to be set in a contemporary Queensland that was somehow equipped with concentration camps. Yet the book’s flaws in a way worked to Demidenko’s advantage, because of the allowances we’re ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden ...”

“... am I neglected? is he/she overrated? – they would quickly decline into paranoia. When Robert Frost died, John Berryman’s first response was It’s scary. Who’s Number One? Who’s Number One? Cal’s Number One, isn’t he? – which at least has the virtue of transparency. But as we modestly (and necessarily) insist that we’re just ...”

“... of how the people with power in his new state might wield it. As we now know, they became what Robert Conquest, in his introduction to Djilas’s book, calls the ‘priviligentsia’. The ‘inspectorate’ – the KGB – defended them, instead of policing them. In a double-take at the end of the book, Julian West wakes up in old Boston. The ...”

“... when the hapless consort’s hairline started to recede or his ardour flag. This is the version Robert Graves gives in his Greek Myths, and though Graves’s anthropology is just as shaky as J.G. Frazer’s, I love the poetic truth at the kernel of it. Certainly the question ‘Who is your father?’ only becomes pressing when property is inherited through ...”

“... of particular interest to anyone curious about the first British settlement of Australia, for as Robert Hughes and others have so forcefully reminded us, the closing-off of the North American market for felons after 1776 compelled London officials to find other locations where convicts could be dumped. As James Matra explained in 1783, the British turned to ...”

“... If you look around you in the Tube you may see someone, usually a man, reading a thriller by Robert Ludlum, or someone else, usually a woman, making her way through one of Catherine Cookson’s romances. On a good day there will be one person reading a novel by Anita Brookner. But that’s about it. Among those who don’t travel on the Tube, the ...”