“... and cold and inconsiderate. One begins to see parallels with Lawrance Thompson’s quest for Robert Frost: as Thompson, at first a hero-worshipper, dredged deeper into the material that eventually became his big biography, the hero began more and more to take on the lineaments of a monster. When she set out on her quest for the truth, Polly already knew ...”

“... 3 July. My TV film The Insurance Man has won the ‘Beautiful Human Life Award’ in Japan and Robert Hines, the young actor who starred in the film, has been out to Tokyo to collect the citation. He calls round with a souvenir for me. It is a headband as worn by Kamikaze pilots. In the market today: ‘Listen, there’s nothing you can teach me about ...”

“... statist designs of the New Deal, the New York World’s Fair, Nazi Germany and the urban plans of Robert Moses, meant to confirm leftist suspicions that the Western democracies are proto-fascist. Nonetheless, Hart’s novelistic treatment of 1940 reveals a wild grain in his conservatism, a sympathy with maverick energies that has occasionally disturbed the ...”

“... she said to him on one of his early weekends, surprised to see his mail addressed to the Hon. Robert Brand. Brand fell in love with Phyllis, and watched in agony as she flirted with Pennant and several other men. (She was a ‘callous and provocative allumeuse’.) He saw himself and his friend Kerr as inept at wooing. All the same, two years after ...”

“... diverse group with impressive credentials: for example, the former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Lord Michael Carver, the former chief of the British Defence Staff; Bruce Blair, who has written extensively about nuclear command and control issues; Fred Iklé, who headed the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Ford; and ...”

“... to disagree, but they, too, have been won over by the sheer energy of the fifty-overs game. Robert Winder’s Hell for Leather is an account of a trip to India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 1996, when these countries were staging the World Cup.* Winder found a subcontinent in love with cricket. The contrast with England could not have been more ...”

“... induces a quasi-philosophic calm. The French term ‘nature morte’ (the first use recorded in Robert is from 1752) and the English ‘still life’ (which was being used at the end of the 17th century) have different connotations despite being derived from the same Dutch word – stilleven. On the one hand, autumnal abundance, the fruits of the ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... of an Idea, C.B. Macpherson’s more incautious The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Robert Nozick’s notorious Anarchy, State and Utopia and Lawrence Becker’s modest text on Property Rights. But none of these has made a concerted attempt to think through the ways in which property rights have been conceived in modern history and to draw a set ...”

“... volumes of the English version. It was Keene who first discovered Konishi, making him known to Robert Brower and myself when Keene wrote Brower that Konishi’s Nihon Bungakushi was by all odds the best going. We got the book, and in due course Konishi arrived to spend 15 months at Stanford (when Sir George Sansom was writing his history of Japan ...”

“... strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic poet (she published under the name ‘Speranza’) and was closely associated with the Fenian Movement. In 1882, Wilde told a lecture audience in San ...”

“... a past as a psychopathic bandit leader, ‘Satan Joao’, and a sudden repentance to match that of Robert the Devil in the old story which has been his favourite as a child (a story, like ‘St Julien l’Hospitalier’, full of the melodramatic and possibly not spurious appeal of its provision for saving discontinuities, abrupt redemptions in damned ...”

“... servants framed, implemented and ran them. Late in the administration of Lindsay’s predecessor Robert Wagner, there had been some notably unsuccessful efforts at incorporating community participation in anti-poverty programmes. Lindsay, and his young mayoral aides, all newcomers to the day-to-day management of City affairs, were committed to active ...”

“... of that date of 1978 makes one wonder how the editor could have missed the official role of Sir Robert Wroth in the Parliament of 1604 (I,38) when all was explained by Dr Nicholas Tyacke in 1977. The Neale-Notestein ‘paradigm’ – the story of a powerful and independent House of Commons – broods over these volumes, emphasising that they belong to eras ...”

“... and sexuality, we can now make out a whole army of allies. Sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris or Richard Dawkins represent the more overtly reductionist end of this force. Eysenck is often ready to associate himself with such work: significantly, he often does so in precisely the publicist and popular contexts that Desmond ...”