“... formidable rationalist who destroys the faith of the hapless clerical hero of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere. At the age of 38, Pattison narrowly missed becoming Rector of Lincoln in an election which he has described in a manner that makes the late C.P. Snow’s account of a somewhat similar affair seem milk-and-water stuff. Pattison took refuge in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with daunting erudition and sympathy the similar though special constraints that the recusant poet Robert Southwell likewise bowed to. When he agrees that Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe’, with its deliberate naivety, should be read as a sophisticated variation on the Mediaeval nativity-ballad, he is surely near to acknowledging that we can guard against the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on Gliding and Soaring, which was a translation of the reminiscences of the German pioneer Robert Kronfeld, but although it provides an interesting account of the early development of gliding, it stops at the threshold of the really outstanding progress of the next twenty years.On Being a Bird is largely a descriptive book, with some charming attempts ...”

“... now recognise, in G.S. Fraser’s anthology Poetry Now (1956). It appeared again that same year in Robert Conquest’s anthology New Lines, and I fear I did not then recognise in it, as I do now, perhaps the finest poem in that volume, and certainly the most surprising. It is, I suppose and hope, well-known: but it isn’t famous – as it deserves to be. It ...”

“... Is a history of sexuality possible? It is easy to envisage a history of the language of enticement, the trail of clothes on the floor, the bed even, but the coupling, the thing itself, how could we nail that to the historian’s rack? An instinct timeless in its force, an experience at once private, secret and charmingly individual, how could it be made to submit to dates and social determination? It is easier to admit that the language of love knows its different tropes and turns in time than to admit that, if this is so, the experience it represents must have a history too ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no word for understatement. She won prizes but less international recognition than her warm friend Robert Lowell, who consistently celebrated her: Dear Elizabeth, Half New-Englander, half fugitive Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board – Unable to settle anywhere, or live Our usual roaring sublime. Elizabeth Bishop certainly never roared. In this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we can’t altogether accept the claims of his literary Muse, who allows him some felicities – Robert Flaherty was ‘like an Irish Bishop who had turned gangster’ – but more often lets him flounder (‘She was a neat chick’, of a Czech actress of the Thirties), we can at least salute the book’s utter transparency and lack of guile about both ...”

“... alive and around at the time. I discovered that even this could be fudged in some standard works. Robert Payne is an acknowledged expert on Russian affairs, author of Dostoyevsky: A Human Portrait, The Image of Chekhov, The Three Worlds of Boris Pasternak. The Life and Death of Lenin (1964) runs to 672 pages. I returned to it to check the death toll in the ...”

“... persuaded post-war Conservatives that – in the adaptive and ameliorist tradition of Sir Robert Peel – they should accept the (apparently irreversible) political realities of Keynsian economics, public ownership and the welfare state. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the early Fifties he continued the policies of fiscal management and full ...”