“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fascinating to the casual observer? They are in the same comic position as the plumbers in one of Robert Dhéry’s films, who stalk backstage through hordes of stark-naked showgirls without paying them the slightest heed while talking about nuts and bolts. In Jour de Fête, the postman played by Jacques Tati is entranced by the idea of Americanisation of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to dwell on the mixture of manners, the ‘tension between the styles’. Everett suggests that Robert Hitchens’s Bella Donna, a bestseller which figures in the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 – a fine English murder – was one of Eliot’s sources, and that he had been reading Gentlemen prefer blondes and Ring Lardner, here described with some ...”

“... higher. In 1949 the combination of a small legacy, frustration at Putnam, and my friendship with Robert Kee, led to the founding of the firm that bore our names, with my wife as literary director. I soon discovered, though, that my temperament is not that of a loner, and seven years later, when the time had come to raise new capital (an aspect of business I ...”

“... and has defined his political ideal in ‘a celebrated study of the Utopian Socialists from Robert Owen to William Morris’. Marquis is also, it emerges, a dirty-minded lecher who betrays his disciple Richard sexually and intellectually before being carried off raving to the lunatic asylum. He returns at the end of the novel to lead the fight against ...”

“... seemed to feel entitled to the world’s gratitude. ‘Because I am blessed by my good brain,’ Robert Horton, one of Browne’s predecessors, boasted, ‘I tend to get the right answer rather quicker and more often than most people.’ It’s not difficult to imagine Hayward saying something similar. He committed gaffe after gaffe – denying ...”

“... without noticing it. The first European to discover the Mississippi from the sea was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was assisted by local Indian guides in 1682. On a riverbank several days upstream La Salle shouted ‘Vive le Roi!’ and claimed the Mississippi Basin for Louis XIV. He named the vast territory, amounting to a third of the ...”

“... Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was fascinated by the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the godfather of modern magic, so when he and Dash put their tricks out to work, at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they performed as the Houdini Brothers: with their thick black hair and swarthy complexions they didn’t ...”

“... looking for funds for his Alexandrian mission, he ended up in the wake of the English adventurer Robert Shirley, on his way from Isfahan to Madrid via the pope. The new mercantile and missionary networks became a vast new scientific instrument, but for Galileo, content to have travelled merely to the stars, such a change was unimaginable. In 1638, when he ...”

“... departure ceremony in front of the Pentagon with the honoree inspecting rank on rank of troops. Robert Gates, his successor, has done a fine job of not being Donald Rumsfeld. The press cherishes the access he grants them. The military bask in the freedom he grants them to fight the various wars bequeathed by his predecessor. The White House staff applaud ...”

“... it, sadly, as a back-handed assessment of the other achievements. Nichols quotes with disapproval Robert Craft on Ravel’s ‘inability to emerge from the emotional world of his childhood’, but might have represented Craft more fairly by including the rest of the remark (in Current Convictions), which has it that Ravel ‘became a sophisticated ...”

“... and racism even in notes to his mum was, for Amis, a sign of humourless cultural Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from him ...”

“... and precocious Mary Ward, later better known as Mrs Humphry Ward, author of the hugely successful Robert Elsmere (1888). Through the good offices of her uncle, Matthew Arnold, she met Renan in Paris, and thanks to the patronage of John Morley she reviewed his autobiography in Macmillan’s Magazine. Renan’s conception of the ethical character of Jesus ...”