“... films of the 1950s, for that matter – and no gay characters either (although Dennis Price and Robert Hamer, the star and director of Kind Hearts and Coronets, were both gay). The quintessential ‘Englishness’ so often lauded in these films wasn’t total: throughout his book, Stubbs is unusually attentive to the musical content of screen comedy, and he ...”

“... reference to Sartre and Jung. ‘One night Juan recounted the entire plot of an epic poem by Robert Browning,’ the narrator says. ‘Juan only brought up Browning because the poet raised pertinent questions about the very act of composition’ – as if Juan is a term paper come to life. Most of this amounts to little more than a list of reading ...”

“... campaigned against a scheme of sending the ‘Black poor’ on London’s streets to Sierra Leone. Robert Wedderburn, born in Jamaica, became a celebrated preacher and orator; his was an uncompromising Black voice. He linked political radicalism with abolitionism and threatened British slave owners with the fate suffered by French planters in the Haitian ...”

“... and distinctive talent. Gerard Manley Hopkins thought the author might be Irish, observing to Robert Bridges in 1885 that ‘Field is a common, Michael a very common, Irish name.’ Bradley triumphantly reported that at least one reader was convinced that Field must be ‘a Bristol man’. Privately, the authors called themselves ...”

“... which takes place at the private Seabrook College, the beleaguered history teacher, Howard, reads Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and becomes obsessed not just with the First World War but with the mythology of the White Goddess.Murray’s work isn’t quite like that of any other writer – certainly no modern Irish writer – but he has learned a lot ...”

“... upon Foole (1600), a collection of stories about well-known fools compiled by the stage clown Robert Armin, Somer is biddable and universally beloved – admired at court for his willingness to intercede with the king on behalf of the common people (he ‘wisht the king to doe good deeds great store,/Which causde the court to love him more and ...”

“... or legitimise increasingly strident assertions of immutable racial hierarchy. The Scottish surgeon Robert Knox, who claimed in Races of Men (1850) that ‘race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word civilisation depends upon it,’ completed his medical training in Paris in the 1820s. So did Josiah Clark Nott, a surgeon from South Carolina, who ...”

“... Dewey was as romantic a communitarian as Frank and Mumford were, or as Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Bellah are. But his romanticism was more radical. His vision was of a community bound together by romance alone, by a shared quest rather than shared principles, a shared willingness to experiment rather than settled convictions. His attempt to get us ...”

“... Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often ...”

“... were a ‘deadly’ compound of ‘credulity, superstition and fanaticism’. Robert Burton’s visions of religious madness as a satanic pandemic, a commonplace in Tudor and Stuart England, seemed increasingly incomprehensible to those ‘rational’ 18th-century Christians unconvinced of direct divine (let alone diabolic) intervention in ...”

“... Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah ...”

“... that much less probable, as was widely recognised. However, such attempts are still being made. Robert Boyle SJ, in the Quiry, points out the liturgical grandeur of the language at the parting of Bloom and Stephen, as they purge themselves by pissing together in the garden with their eyes on the lighted blind which shows that Molly (the Holy Ghost) is not ...”

“... had been worn out only by student travels to Paris and Heidelberg and, almost certainly, Italy. Robert Tracy gives an account of the main influences in the air at the time of Mandelstam’s first book, Stone, here translated in toto into rhymed verse, with a parallel Russian text, an excellent introduction and very illuminating notes. Tracy evokes the world ...”

“... There is only one baby in The Man without Qualities. Her mother is Rachel, maid to Ermelinda Tuzzi who is the wife of Section Chief Tuzzi, a bureaucrat in the service of the Imperial Austrian Government in Vienna. The year is 1913: Rachel was 19 and believed in miracles. She had been born in a squalid shack in Poland, where a mezuzah hung on the doorpost and the soil came up through the cracks in the floorboards ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”