“... 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 ...”

“... fined for hoarding it. In Hitler’s war, rationing set in early. The crackdown was hastened by Robert Boothby, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, who professed to be shocked by the wanton display of sugared cakes in Princes Street, Edinburgh. It became an offence to put sugar on the exterior of any cake, bun, biscuit, pastry, scone or bread ...”

“... mind than Berlin’s, and his fall, like Satan’s, was therefore the greater. It would have taken Robert Browning to convey this with anything like the comic pathos, the irony, which it deserved. Sparrow’s ‘failure’, if such it was, to become a poet, or a serious antiquarian, must have felt for much of his life like a success. He ‘saved’ All Souls ...”

“... to this history of ambivalence, in 1883 Beddoes’s entire oeuvre ended up in the care of Robert Browning. Browning had expressed to Kelsall, Beddoes’s executor, his admiration for the poet, and Kelsall, hoping that Browning’s influence might help in establishing Beddoes’s reputation, bequeathed the Beddoes papers to him. What became known as ...”

“... it for thirty years and who thought he was worth an OM. Among his friends were T.E. Lawrence and Robert Graves. He had the patriarchal scholar’s satisfaction of receiving a festschrift, organised by Sir Michael Howard, but never achieved the university distinction his attainments probably merited. When in 1946 Swinton at last relinquished what Danchev ...”

“... in his own writings. Take first ‘disguise’, disguise starting with his name – he was born Robert Zimmerman. The creation of an accompanying false self, call it Bobby or Zimmy, is not, in any obvious way, a device to enter the great hall of American fame. It could be one way of keeping people at bay; it could be to do with American Jewish ...”

“... 1650 ‘under pressure from the threat of piracy’; and he cites a letter from Hobbes’s friend Robert Payne to Sheldon of May 1650 which says: ‘I sent notice to Mr Hobbes, yt his booke De Cive was translated into English, & desird him to prevent yt translation by one of his owne.’ The letter continues, however: ‘but he sends me word he hath an other ...”

“... choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly because of the ...”

“... of Bloomsbury, and of Vita in particular, but his shotgun method reached many others, including Robert Graves and Laura Riding, J.C. Squire, and London literary politics in general. Some of the lines are funny, even witty, but more often the abuse is heavy, repetitious and sprawling: when Campbell was hating, he didn’t know when to stop. Still, the poem ...”

“... restored the position of the monarchy by reducing the power of the great earls, but Odo of Bayeux, Robert of Mortain and Roger of Montgomery, with incomes of more than £2,000 a year from their English lands alone, were all, to borrow Warren Hollister’s term, ‘super-magnates’. True, in William I they faced a king richer in land and cash than Edward the ...”

“... phenomenon seems to suggest, fragmentation remains at the heart of the American social fabric. Robert Wiebe, one of the most creative historians of modern America, has argued recently that the United States is, in his phrase, ‘a segmented society’. Its people cope with the enormous diversity of their nation less by rallying behind common assumptions ...”

“... it had been officially adopted, which was perhaps the case with these French examples. After Sir Robert Peel’s death in 1850 over twenty public statues were erected of him. This, Read acutely suggests, marks the point at which the practice of commemorating nonroyal public figures in this way (which had begun very early in this country with Nelson and ...”

“... have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the military operations per se, but excels in her ...”