“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There are some notable recent success stories, from Newt Gingrich, with a PhD in history, to Robert Preston, an English ABD (all but dissertation) whose latest non-fiction book, The Hot Zone, is a bestseller. In bad times, the MLA has provided expert advice on non-academic employment. But the graduate programmes themselves have continued to reproduce ...”

“... and down Carnaby Street; fashion-following funkateers in London clubland in 1982 are celebrated in Robert Elms’s grand explication of a scene that amounted to no more than a bunch of people wandering around with no socks, espadrilles and holes torn in the knees of their jeans. Most ludicrous Londonism of all is a 1972 claim about George Best: ‘Though he ...”

“... in self-actualisation; and to Paris himself, who concludes his book with a Horneyan account of Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons. The result unwittingly reveals the limits of the ‘internal dialogue’ Paris so applauds in Horney. Psychoanalysis might have begun with Freud’s self-analysis at the time of his father’s death. But he also used ...”

“... Barthes’s Mythologies, brilliantly expanded by off-beat, speculative historical adventurers like Robert Darnton, and narrowed by most contemporary researchers to the study of products of mass consumption. Foucault obscurely meditated about authority or confinement or sex; Erica Rand can make equally weighty points with the aid of Ken’s crotch. Part of a ...”

“... per cent for the socialist Lionel Jospin, 19 per cent for Chirac and 8 per cent for the Communist Robert Hue. Ten years ago, on the same measure, the Front received 8 per cent of working-class support. Only 30 per cent of Le Pen’s voters see themselves as belonging to the Far Right. Another 23 say simply that they are of the Right, while 29 per cent believe ...”

“... The last thing that dreams should do is come true. It would end in futile tears if they did, much as it would for the autophagist who chomps away at himself from the legs up until he comes to his head and realises that he can never achieve the final consummation. Dreams are for dreaming about. The Hollywood dream-masters got it right when they had Judy Garland playing a star-struck teenager gazing at a pin-up of Clark Gable and singing ‘If you were the only boy in the world ...”

“... Elias wrote about the invention of childhood before Philippe Ariès, about cat-massacres before Robert Darnton. Countless virgin territories that he mapped out have since been thickly settled. His analysis of court life and the ‘royal mechanism’, further elaborated in a later book on The Court Society(1969), remains fruitful not only to those working in ...”

“... implement the aims of the Founding Fathers. The way to interpret the Constitution, wrote Judge Robert Bork, a leading conservative legal theorist, is simply to determine and apply ‘the objective meaning that constitutional language had when it was adopted’. The doctrine of original intent has a superficial plausibility. If each generation can redefine ...”

“... feet and inches, as for police records. Moira Shearer had rich material to go on in Sir Robert Helpmann, with his ‘bulging forehead and wide protruding eyes’, narrow shoulders, large diaphragm and ‘thin unmuscular legs’; fine for balletic and dramatic roles, but ‘in modern dress he seemed too fantastic to be believable’. Lord David ...”

“... the mask is needed to replace the clumsinesses of journalism, constrained to report the evident. Robert Brustein says that, as against Hamlet’s shout of rage ‘I know not seems,’ Pirandello’s characters know almost nothing else ... they are all devoted to appearances, as defences against the agony of the changing personality.’ Russian ...”

“... in the US – the giant statues of the Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are said to form the largest sculpture in the world – served as an Olympic site. Thanks to Jim Crow, black Atlantans were denied entrance when Joel Chandler Harris’s home was turned into a museum, even though Harris had taken his Uncle Remus ...”

“... in ‘rather pokey prefabs hastily erected to host some previous summit of African leaders’. Robert Morley consoled Denis when he complained about ‘those buggers at Private Eye’: ‘You should be grateful, my darling; they have given you a personality.’ The only unusual thing about Denis and his opinions is that he happened to have the ear of a ...”

“... 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 ...”