“... poets especially have been very keen on remembering what they haven’t done. I’m thinking of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and the unrealised walk in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked ...”

“... not actually married to K, has baby Nicolette, K going off to Balkans, now J falling in love with Robert Kee, who spends weekend at Ham Spray, F. Partridge approves,’ and so on. Sometimes it all seemed very distant and unimportant. And as for Frances Partridge’s approval, I think I would have gone a long way to avoid spending a weekend at Ham Spray (that ...”

“... and for a new centrist political party appears to have been driven by her infatuation with Lord Robert Cecil (Holmes doesn’t make entirely clear whether this was romantic). ‘I do not approve of extremes in politics,’ she wrote. ‘I distrust Revolution on the one hand and Reaction on the other, and I believe we ought to pursue a middle course.’ She ...”

“... in Manama in 2011. The crackdown began in earnest two days after the US secretary of defence, Robert Gates, had visited the country. Saudi and Emirati security forces crossed into Bahrain over the King Fahd causeway in British-made Tacticas armoured personnel carriers to support Bahrain’s security apparatus. As Wearing argues, ‘Britain could choose to ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... have no idea what it contains. In the 17th century, it was in the possession of the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly ...”

“... lash to and fro like a dog shaking a rat. Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It’s more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the ...”

“... visited or worked in the Loomis Laboratory included Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Robert Wood, E.O. Lawrence, George Kistiakowsky, Leo Szilárd, the Compton brothers (Arthur and Karl) and Albert Einstein. One newspaper columnist observed Loomis’s odd form of philanthropy: ‘In Tuxedo Park, his home, he has built the Loomis Laboratories, and ...”

“... the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and ...”

“... enthusiasm for Ossian saw the publication of the important Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood. In the late 18th century there was a revival of serious education in the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers of those able to ...”

“... internal unity has gravely impaired. The hollowness of this pretext has become obvious ever since Robert Simpson, one of our leading composers, announced his resignation after decades of distinguished BBC service: the saddest event, this, in the BBC’s musical history. Otherwise, the Corporation has succeeded, more or less, in keeping its dissidents from ...”

“... himself’; nor did she blench at the prospect that legitimate power would be transferred to Robert Mugabe, whom three months before she had described as a ‘terrorist no better than the IRA’. In Stephenson’s view, her conversion actually occurred immediately after her return from Australia a month before the Conference, as a result of Lord ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”