“... the material that came out of Wales and Ireland, farms and fishing, men’s work with horses. Like Robert Roberts, another recorder of the lives of the poor born at the end of the last century, Evans grew up in a grocer’s shop – not in the classic slum of Salford, but in the mining valley of Abercynon. The children of shopkeepers in poor working-class ...”

“... cry out to be tested. It is no surprise that one of many legends about John Hunter suggests that Robert Louis Stevenson based Dr Jekyll’s laboratory on Hunter’s house in Leicester Square, Jekyll having ‘bought the house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon’. Hunter remains a figure as legendary as his Giant. Myth can make for cliché, but Mantel ...”

“... the period’s other radicals: William Thompson, Francis Place, George Petrie, Thomas Spence, Robert Owen and Richard Carlile. In his day, Carlile was no less celebrated as a political agitator, and as a polemical atheist, than he was as a sexual reformer: some such mix of activities was the rule for this group. But it was Carlile’s sexual programme ...”

“... poetry that has always been careful of locality: Randolph Stow’s early work, for example, or Robert Adamson’s Hawkesbury River poems, or, from an earlier generation, Judith Wright’s concern for landscape. The title-poem of Kinsella’s most recent book, The Hunt – Other Poems (1998), is dedicated to Les Murray, who reaches out to an international ...”

“... Aeschylus’ own son, Euphorion. In the foreword to his 1967 prose version of Prometheus Bound, Robert Lowell noted that this play is ‘probably the most lyrical of the Greek classical tragedies’, but also ‘the most undramatic – one man, a sort of demigod at that, chained to a rock, orated to, and orating at, a sequence of embodied ...”

“... in the country. Labour in the city reached the zenith of its power during the mayoralty of Robert Wagner Jr (son of the senator who had drafted the New Deal measure recognising workers’ right to collective bargaining) between 1954 and 1966. Elected with strong labour support, Wagner extended the right to unionise to municipal workers, and presided ...”

“... a strategy of decrepitude’). But he is also bewildered by Nairn’s long and enjoyable resort to Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities as a source of comparison. For Dewar, the parallels drawn with Musil’s disintegrating Austria-Hungary are ‘tendentious … who knows or cares?’ It may be a long novel for politicians with infernally little spare ...”

“... procreational theory that constructs the male role as creative and the female role as nurturing. (Robert Alter is praised for using the word ‘seed’ in his translation of Genesis, where others fudge the problem by using ‘posterity’, ‘descendants’ or ‘progeny’. But the praise is immediately revoked: ‘Writing in the late 20th century, he cannot ...”

“... Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm. No one to whom I have begun recounting the story ...”

“... a pass than to bring them to bed. He may have yearned to face danger during the war as his friends Robert Kee and Paddy Leigh-Fermor did, but he made it impossible to do so. Having somehow survived basic training in the Guards depot at Caterham, he was sent to Sandhurst as an officer cadet. He lay in the three-tonner apparently incapably drunk, but as it swung ...”

“... frogs, the briar grows thicker and thicker round the rose. Sometimes the authority he claims is Robert Lowell’s: They wear their skins like cast-offs. Their skin grows Puckered round the knees like rumpled hose. There are also poems – ‘On Not Being Milton’ and ‘The Rhubarbarians’ – in which, enjoying a bit of rough stuff, he plays the ...”

“... Cuvier – manoeuvred for mastery. In this world – to which our most trustworthy guide is not Robert Merton but Sir Lewis Namier or the Stendhal who understood Julien Sorel – Cuvier did indeed become the great place-man, dispensing a loaf here to nephew Charles and some fishes – mainly fossil ones – to brother Frédéric. And he did so because he ...”

“... seems so long ago. Zimbabwe has just celebrated the third anniversary of its independence. Comrade Robert Mugabe rules. Ministers have been fired, reinstated, shuffled sideways. The British have made an integrated national army out of the two guerrilla forces and the North Koreans have invited themselves to train a separate praetorian guard. The IMF has been ...”

“... There are scattered in this volume some excellent sketches of his contemporaries. There is Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate, whose ‘father and mother went to Rome in their own carriage’ and whose son became Permanent Secretary to the Treasury. Tennyson himself, Sassoon says, ‘never looked more bard-like than Bridges did when I arrived this evening ...”

“... were ‘the heirs of Swift, Berkeley and Grattan’. Not quite: he cited Burke, Grattan, Swift, Robert Emmet and Parnell, but not Berkeley. On Mahaffy: it may be that McDowell, who joined with W.B. Stanford to write the life of Mahaffy, has tired of the man, but the account of him in the present book makes him appear tawdry and obvious. His views on the ...”