“... overlooked co-author of the ham-fisted National Gallery extension (with her much praised husband, Robert Venturi), wrote that ‘architects lost their social concern: the architect as macho evolutionary was succeeded as the architect as dernier cri of the artworld.’ Simpson doesn’t conform to any of these templates. He is an apostate to all current ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... opinion at the tune. The author clearly documents the radical difference opinion on Suez between Robert Menzies and his Minister for External Affairs, R.G. Casey, whose public notoriety so astonished Lord Carrington when he arrived in the middle of the crisis to take up his post as British High Commissioner. I am not sure that the title gives quite 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 ...”

“... like Anne Anderson and Honor Appleton get in, but not the more distinctive Gladys Peto; Robert Lawson is here but not Lawson Wood; A.E. Bestall (briefly) but not Thomas Henry. In compiling the book – which is, in fact, very nearly comprehensive – the authors have drawn on the holdings of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in particular the Guy ...”

“... Nicolas Copernicus’s reform of astronomy delivered a formidable blow to our sense of self in nature. In its effects, Copernicanism probably affected human consciousness more deeply than Darwinism. Published in 1543, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres argued that our earthly globe is not the unique and motionless centre of the great cosmic sphere ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not to do what the Panel said. I asked them whether in these circumstances Rupert Murdoch or Robert Maxwell or one of the other so-called ‘big hitters’ would pay any attention to the Panel whatever, and was told that they probably would not. But here I was up against Catch 22 with a vengeance. I am a member of the Securities and Investments ...”

“... simultaneously reinforces the notion that to be homosexual is abnormal. Seymour-Smith’s life of Robert Graves was respectful, sympathetic and engrossing; his book on Kipling is not so much a critical biography as a poor relation of Flaubert’s Parrot or Anthony Burgess’s highly speculative novel about Shakespeare, Nothing Like the ...”

“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”