“... by his widow with the customary bottle of champagne and went into service as a pleasure cruiser in Robert Ley’s Strength through Joy organisation, which provided ‘classless’ holidays for (some) members of the Volksgemeinschaft, subsidised by money seized from the trade unions. In the remaining years of peace it cruised the Mediterranean and the Norwegian ...”

“... robbers and even on their stout bearing on the gallows. In late Elizabethan years the Jesuit Robert Parsons conjectured that there was more highway robbery in England than probably anywhere in the world. The miscreants ‘were sometimes of no base Condition, or Quality . . . but rather Gentlemen, or wealthy Men’s Sons, moved thereunto not so much of ...”

“... it was Charles II’s recurrent malaria that finally made its use acceptable. He was treated by Robert Talbor, a Cambridge apothecary, who, while disparaging the bark, employed a secret recipe that contained it. Charles recommended Talbor to his friend Louis XIV when the Dauphin was ill with fever. The treatment was successful, and Talbor became a pensioned ...”

“... study of Greenwich Village she showed that there was order behind the apparent chaos. While Robert Moses was proposing to carve up New York to make way for the car and expressway she called for the rich process of interaction that defined the city to be nurtured rather than destroyed. She envisaged a large residential population living in mixed-use ...”

“... Max, Braveheart and Patriot all in one. It is this ‘moral value’ of redemptive violence that Robert Gober evoked in his recent installation at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. As usual with Gober, the exhibit was a broken allegory that both elicited and resisted interpretation. It opened with two stacked garbage cans in plaster covered by a sheet ...”

“... the benefit of ten minutes’ chat with the Führer and was able to share his enthusiasm for the Robert Donat comedy The Ghost Goes West. It was all very genial, even if in a social sense not quite what the milord and his family were used to. Lady Mairi, who still lives in Mount Stewart, told Kershaw that Himmler had reminded her of a ‘shop-walker at ...”

“... write any poems until the autumn of 1914. Thinking over their genesis afterwards, his friend Robert Frost commented that ‘the decision he made in going into the army helped him make the other decision in form.’ This is both a simple material explanation and perhaps also a piece of soul-searching. Frost knew that the more Thomas believed he could ...”

“... Robert Hughes​ has a great enthusiasm for Goya’s art, which he communicates in this biography, together with much useful information, forcefully expressed, about the rival factions at the Bourbon court, the Napoleonic invasion, the evolution of bull-fighting, what a maja was, what guerrillas were. This is mixed with some less useful observations – there were in those days priests who ‘groped boys’ and were ‘quite as bad’ as their modern counterparts – and some errors, as when Hughes claims that the curls of pubic hair in the Naked Maja are certainly the earliest in Western art ...”

“... the hardships of life on board a naval brig, not least the misery of sharing a cabin with Captain Robert Fitzroy, whose temperament Darwin privately described as ‘a most unfortunate one. This was shown not only by passion but by fits of long-continued moroseness against those who had offended him,’ particularly the unfortunate Darwin, whose journals bear ...”

“... My acceptance of an offer to review the Kavanagh book landed me in a mess of puzzles. Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid writing of him as a brother since my interest in him was mainly as a poet ...”

“... good or ill crops up again: the recumbent wife’s blue-cotton gloves, the allusion to dead uncle Robert, who once posthumously materialised in a bus queue at Hendon, and later in the winter garden. The winter garden of Russia is the scene of a good deal of materialisation. Ashburner loses his suitcase but it turns up, interfered with; Nina disappears more or ...”

“... to those critics of poetry who simply follow current fashions. He possesses in a high degree what Robert Lowell called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his work often echoes those early Irish nature poems he admires – poetry which, as he points out, belonged to a tradition which did not undergo Romance influences and which ‘registers certain sensations ...”

“... to have been less thorough than one might wish, to judge by a number of minor slips, such as that Robert Oppenheimer escaped from Germany, or that the Uranium-235 bomb is started by firing two hemispherical pieces together. He blames Alexander, Minister of Defence in 1947, for basing military planning on the ill-conceived assumption that there would be no ...”

“... every weekend and becomes an urban beach.The story of the M8 starts with the Bruce Report in 1945 (Robert Bruce was Glasgow’s chief engineer). It is remembered for two startling proposals: first, the destruction of almost all of the city centre and its architecturally significant buildings, including the School of Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Mitchell ...”

“... or requests had to be written or typed on the correct blank form.In Good-Bye to All That (1929), Robert Graves complained about the ‘army forms marked “Urgent”’ which ‘constantly arrived from headquarters’ and were ‘all contradictory’. These forms were prefixed ‘AF’ and indexed with a number and a ‘class’ letter, which in 1917 ran ...”