“... promotion from the back benches to junior ministerial office. He records that he was dining with Robert MacLennan, then Labour MP for Caithness and later his stop-gap successor as leader of the SDP. The purpose of the dinner was to discuss how to get rid of Wilson, but it was interrupted by a message to call at Number 10 immediately. The simon-pure doctor ...”

“... about post-war America: vulgarity, self-promotion and hustle; the giant-finned American cars in Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’, that slide by on grease with ‘a savage servility’; the slippery, oily and false. Americanism, slickness and writing come together in impressions that render Plath as all shiny surface, like the bright red lipstick ...”

“... and the human touch which made him such a fine teacher. The long list of his pupils runs from Robert Kee at Magdalen in the Thirties to Kathy Burk, the last of his postgraduate students, in the Seventies. But a survey of the many historians he taught would show that in various respects they did not agree with Alan Taylor or indeed with one another. One of ...”

“... called ‘harmony’: a world without financial risk. ‘From the Marshall Plan to the present,’ Robert Gilpin observes in the Newland collection, ‘successive US Administrations have used foreign aid and influenced financial flows to support US foreign policy objectives.’ Japan will not do this. It has no foreign interests which are not economic, and ...”

“... blacks in Chicago and other Northern cities to respond to stimuli as European immigrants had. Robert Kennedy’s ideas for the urban Community Development programme were based on the notion that the ghettos could be converted (in Lemann’s words) ‘into the kind of launching-pads for immigrant upward mobility that the Irish neighbourhoods of Boston had ...”

“... the potential enemy’s economic strength were based on the sort of calculation that writers like Robert Conquest have long criticised. According to a memorandum submitted by the Economic Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office in April 1946, for instance, Soviet industrial output would exceed that of the rest of Europe by 1960 and overtake that of the ...”

“... as surrealist. The patrons of Max Ernst and Buñuel, the de Noailles, commissioned a terrace from Robert Mallet-Stevens with rectangular windows in the surrounding wall framing ‘scenes’ in the landscape. These look the Picturesque round the last bend to its illogical conclusion. The natural landscape was now a series of landscape paintings and could be ...”

“... him went the Confederates’ last hope, though they fought on for nearly three years. The revered Robert E. Lee himself was no good except on the defensive, where he could do wonders. Neither Keegan nor Alexander has much time for Clausewitz, whose theories of total war as substitute for diplomacy were important in their time and place, but have little ...”

“... the prospect of becoming his own assembly line, all he could think of was Under Under the Volcano. Robert Lowell writes: I memorised tricks to set the river on fire, somehow never wrote something to go back to. Lowry was the absolute opposite, no tricks and a work he was unable to get away from. He described himself as ‘a sometimes subtle if not good ...”

“... was busy with Gazza-saving schemes right to the end. Unluckily, his only source of finance was Robert Maxwell: another good reason for Sugar, Rupert Murdoch’s friend, to have moved in when he did. Irving Scholar is now seen as a typical loadsamoney illusionist of the Eighties, and is taken to be the architect of all Spurs’ financial cock-ups in that ...”

“... like Blake or Ginsberg, a poet for the wild Sixties. A provocative spin was given to the debate by Robert Bernard Martin in his Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Martin traced the Tennysonian gloom back to the fear of stigmatising illness. Young Alfred’s formative years, according to this biography, were haunted by ‘the dark counterpoint of ...”

“... bigger and more significant revolution than punk: this is a wholesale reappraisal of pop music. As Robert Ray writes, in his illuminating essay in Present Tense: ‘Sampling and sequencing, go the current complaints, make musicians unnecessary ... we can detect here the historical complaint against every new technology and every avant-garde movement that ...”

“... reads his poems of the 1830s against more orthodox Tory productions by John Wilson, John Keble and Robert Montgomery, as well as some ‘vapid’ lyrics (the adjective is Tennyson’s) from the popular album collections of the period. Familiar works like ‘The Palace of Art’ and ‘The Lotus Eaters’ (both 1832; revised 1842) appear alongside poems by ...”

“... worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and ...”

“... continue to the year of Truffaut’s death. He has some regular correspondents and confidants – Robert Lachenay, his school friend, Helen Scott, who worked with him on the Hitchcock book, Annette Insdorf, who wrote a book about him – but also writes to friends at the Cahiers, to actors with whom he is working, to journalists requesting information, people ...”