“... imitation of Babbage’s machine printed the English Life Table No 3, of 1864. And that was that. Robert Browning remarked to Elizabeth Barrett that certain revisions Tennyson had made to his poems in deference to the critics were ‘much as if Babbage were to take my opinion – undo his calculating machine by it’. Browning spoke truer than he knew, for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Review crowd, the figure who emerges from Portor’s 1941 text is Austenish, ‘a quiet, tranquil-looking, modest girl’ who sits in a corner listening. Many years, honours, fellowships and prizes later, Paul Binding meets ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”