“... If you look around you in the Tube you may see someone, usually a man, reading a thriller by Robert Ludlum, or someone else, usually a woman, making her way through one of Catherine Cookson’s romances. On a good day there will be one person reading a novel by Anita Brookner. But that’s about it. Among those who don’t travel on the Tube, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... people who will show you a new image, downloaded and printed from the Internet. It is an image of Robert Thompson as he may look now. Vengeance is evergreen, and the regulars know the image by heart and they watch the door.I don’t mean to marshal these thoughts, as Johnson said, into a school and call it an academy, but I believe people in Britain ...”

“... pure form of ‘Stalinism in the East’ goes back to the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Robert Scalapino, a Cold War scholar who came to prominence in the late 1950s. North Korea was indeed Stalinist in its state-run industrialisation drive, and modelled its administration and much of its system on Stalin’s Russia – but so did every other ...”

“... separated the theatres, one behind the other, on a vast paved piazza. But something there is, as Robert Frost says, that does not like a wall. From any angle, these schemes suggested disguised factories for making some plebeian product – meat pies, perhaps – inexplicably thrusting out of the harbour, the same problem that had inspired the soon to be ...”

“... independent element into the system for investigating complaints against the police (at the time Robert Mark, the commissioner of the Met, was attempting to tackle corruption in his force, offering the memorable definition that ‘a good police force is one that catches more crooks than it employs,’ which has continued to prove a demanding benchmark). When ...”

“... staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental ...”

“... David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded ...”