“... of people who did ‘some not wholly fulfilling thing’ – Cuchulain fighting the waves, Robert Gregory taking to the air – their fulfilment to be achieved only when Yeats had emblematised them in strong verse. Seven: Dublin is a capital city in which ‘eight decades’ experience of the telephone has not yet fostered the habit of returning ...”

“... Textbook writers set examinations. The rationale is clear, the interest transparent. In what in the United States is called ‘behavioural science’, such people have a standard first chapter and a standard first question. What is behavioural science the science of? In BS101, the standard first course, some more or less elaborate padding with examples of the answer ‘just that, behaviour’ will do ...”

“... this is to make the reader an eavesdropper on architects at work and aristocrats at play. We meet Robert Adam giving 26 Grosvenor Square its magnificent 18th-century interiors; J.T. Wimperis concocting his splendid fin-de-siècle Queen Anne extravaganzas for the rebuilding of Mount Street; Edwin Lutyens having fun and games over the designs for the new ...”

“... relation between reason and unreason in this area. A recent and distinguished contribution is Robert Parker’s essay on pollution and purification, Miasma. One main feature of this research has been its invocation of comparative anthropology and sociology: not only ancient texts and remains but also the findings of modern fieldworkers have been adduced ...”

“... in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”

“... year or two of the originals. Already, too, there is no question of comparable English authors – Robert May, William Rabisha – being translated in the reverse direction. Yet at this period the connections between cookery and other arts and crafts could still be noticed without undue self-consciousness. Pepys and Evelyn may well have discussed with each ...”

“... Hans-Georg Gadamer ranks as one of Germany’s foremost philosophers. He occupied a chair at Heidelberg for quarter of a century, during which time his lecturing skills and a steady flow of publications brought him a reputation and a following second to none. Since his retirement he has divided his time between Germany and North America. Many of his writings have been translated, and the English version of his major work on Truth and Method has helped to extend his fame ...”

“... Even after her death, which now seems to have become more interesting than her life, the claims of Robert Kennedy, the Communist Party and the Mafia are undecided. On every point Steinem is protective. Marilyn was doubly unfortunate in dying ‘before women began to be honest in public’. The same stories appear in Joe and Marilyn, though more luridly told ...”

“... that since it did not in fact fulfil this function there was no justification for it.’ Robert Hambourger, however, uses some extremely interesting discussions by Anscombe on causality and chance to defend the possibility of rehabilitating one version of the traditional argument from design for the existence of God. Hence it is the Hume of the ...”

“... Yusuf Sayigh on the Arab economies, of Abdullah Bujra on South Yemen, of Hannah Batatu on Iraq, of Robert Graham on Iran, of John Townsend on Oman, of John Duke Anthony on the Amirates, are serious and balanced studies based on first-hand research that try to grapple with the reality of these countries. By contrast, Mr Kelly’s is, for all its length, a ...”

“... And because the man was a great artist, even that shaped and shielded self is worth examining. Robert Giltings’s biography is now in two Penguin paperbacks.* This is, at least for the present, the standard life of Hardy, and it is good to have it available at a very moderate ...”

“... the means to run your own familial institution and support your children. The doctrines of Thomas Robert Malthus are certainly audible here. It was a vice to marry too early, or to marry at all, unless you could afford it, and misery awaited those who broke the rules. The fourth characteristic is a brief age gap between spouses, an average of some two or ...”

“... honest account of it puts it in a good light; he miraculously manages to compare Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson with Gay to the latter’s disadvantage. Henderson is certainly not concerned to minimise the Scottishness of the ballads, but he does emphasise how close formal ‘ballad Scots’ is to ‘ballad English’, and he remarks that ‘Scots folksong ...”

“... ways closer to what the late C.R. Fay would have described as a ‘magazine’ rather than a book. Robert Solow and Peter Temin provide a useful introductory economists’ essay for historians on growth and the inputs that govern it. This stands at the threshold, a necessary exposition of methodology that all economic historians require, but which all but the ...”