“... and also about the happiness of writing a poem, about drinking with John Berryman, dining with Robert Lowell, driving with Stirling Moss, about his lovers, and briefly about his first – brief – marriage, to Frieda Lawrence’s granddaughter. There are in fact more than enough highly polished little gems about family and friends and 20th-century ...”

“... of 1988, which read the work as determined by personal feeling, and the more scholarly accounts of Robert Ackerman and Hugh Lloyd-Jones which located her ‘at the heart’ of the (so-called) Cambridge Ritualists. Reluctant to offer an alternative myth, yet anxious to avoid already trampled ground, Beard instead explores Harrison’s formative years in ...”

“... hear the stress in his voice. He asked the captain to put on the battalion command sergeant-major, Robert Gallagher. A leathery faced Army Ranger of 40, Gallagher had survived the battle of Mogadishu, where he had been wounded three times. Twitty knew Gallagher would be blunt. ‘All right, sergeant-major, I want the truth,’ Twitty said. ‘Do you need ...”

“... in short, a Britain which looks more like America. (Hill was an enthusiastic proponent of Sir Robert Montgomery’s scheme to establish a colony, ‘Azilia’, in South Carolina, on whose ‘sweet plains where all delights are sure’, in the words of his poem ‘The Western Paradise’, ‘Men can, by turns, be ev’ry thing, but poor.’) This view is ...”

“... a Somerset gentry family which had served in India since Henry Strachey went out as secretary to Robert Clive. Jane was clever, as patchily educated as most women of her class and generation, but determined to learn and with ‘a vein in her’, as Lytton later recalled, ‘of oddity and caprice’. Richard, anti-social, a hypochondriac and old enough to be ...”

“... the usual upright, and excruciatingly painful, position. One of the most memorable passages in Robert Harris’s new novel, Imperium, describes the famous crucifixion of the six thousand slave comrades of the rebel Spartacus, who had been rounded up by the Romans in 71 BC. Harris imagines the victorious Roman general, Crassus, carefully choreographing this ...”

“... Given Greenberg’s disdain for Duchamp, his distaste for Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg was predictable. But he also dismissed most other major movements of the 1960s and after: Minimal and Conceptual Art’s high-mindedness; the new art forms that focused on the body and performance; and especially the growth of politically ...”

“... attempt to persuade others that Manilius was worth their trouble. ‘I adjure you,’ he wrote to Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, ‘not to waste your time on Manilius. He writes on astronomy and astrology without knowing either.’ To an American correspondent he wrote: ‘I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few ...”

“... Secret service memoirs are invariably rubbished. When Robert Anderson’s Lighter Side of My Official Life appeared in 1910 – Anderson had headed a counter-Fenian agency – Winston Churchill lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo” ...”

“... and death that remain in one’s consciousness with the particularity of real experience,’ Robert Warshow wrote at the time the movie was released. ‘These images have an autonomy that makes them stronger and more important than any ideas one can attach to them.’ The best thing in Stromboli (1949), the first of Rossellini’s films with Ingrid ...”

“... this systematically and over a period of time. Some time after Walsingham’s death, his colleague Robert Beale recalled that he had engaged ‘some’ of the secretaries in the French Embassy to betray the secrets of French and Scottish ‘dealings’, which was to say, the convolution at the heart of mid-Elizabethan politics: the question of Mary Queen of ...”

“... could never have written anything as unpleasant as that. But he could have been the target of Robert Browning’s jibe (in ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’) about ‘that dear middle-age these noodles praise’, when, ‘you’ll say, once all believed,’ from Henry VIII to the ploughman with his paternoster. So it was not a book above and beyond ...”

“... and to death’: Kenya under Kenyatta was at peace and flourished. But the description fits Robert Mugabe all too well. Mugabe and Mbeki think that provided the Government is a self-described ‘national liberation movement’, people ought to be content, but they aren’t. Zimbabweans, black and white, want a liberal democratic society – all the ...”

“... unionists. Nevertheless, some revisionist historians have recently shown that William Wallace and Robert Bruce, icons of Scotland’s War of Independence against England in the late 13th and early 14th century, became unionist heroes in 19th-century Scottish culture. Without Wallace and Bruce, so Victorian Scots argued, Scotland would have been conquered by ...”

“... and cosy corner-shop atmosphere: exterminate and replace them. The mastermind behind Crown was Robert Haft, a Harvard Business School graduate who had written his master’s thesis on retail discounting. Crown’s philosophy, as displayed on South Lake, was predatory. Find an existing profitable outlet, set up alongside it, discount the neighbour into ...”