“... Salem Possessed) in favour of visiting the Kennedy Library. We saw pictures and movies of JFK and Robert Kennedy, but the high spot for Tony was seeing in our group a classmate rumoured to have been arrested recently for a retail fraud in collusion with a Catholic church official. Our bus then took us to Essex County Club for a picnic lunch, ‘fresh air ...”

“... drew a decidedly crisp letter from Lady Mosley, who called it ‘fanciful in the extreme’. As Robert Skidelsky said of the meeting in his Oswald Moslev: ‘The number of future memoir writers and Labour politicians in the audience alone ensured that it would be talked about for years to come.’ There were also a hundred angry busmen present, out for ...”

“... shift occurred and America emerged as the dominant world influence on the English language. Robert Burchfield, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, recently pointed out in the opening segment of the engaging BBC/PBS series The Story of English, that the centre of gravity of American English has itself shifted in the last generation from the ...”

“... an artist without understanding his relationship to Diego, yet Lord is – with the exception of Robert Wernick – the first writer on him to do justice to that subject. He delineates subtly and accurately the relationship they seemed to have when one knew them, in middle age and onwards. And he unearths events and habits in their childhood and youth which ...”

“... writers and critics came and went. Literature was a vocation in those days, not a profession. For Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell, disciples of those exemplary teacher-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, criticism was an essential component of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel ...”

“... All that seems clear is that it was someone who admired Gilbert Elliot of Minto and was annoyed by Robert Dundas of Arniston, second Lord President. Quite a lot of Scottish writers on politics might fulfil these requirements. The militia was attractive to upper-class society because of the opportunities it gave for the exertion of patronage, to the ...”

“... I haven’t found anybody interesting yet. There are not many young people and the small ‘Robert’ (who calls himself ‘Wob’) doesn’t mind accepting a box of bricks (bought at the barber’s) from me but he doesn’t want me to help to play with ’em. I tried yesterday. ‘Wob’ stood it as long as he could. Then he screwed up his face, and ...”

“... Malcolm Yorke says more about ‘excesses of amorous nature’ than friends and disciples do (like Robert Speaight, whose biography came out in 1966), in whose hands his reputation has largely rested. The very presence of a woman was a temptation and incitement: he had Ayatollah-like ideas about women’s clothing – perhaps a reflection of his ...”

“... drawbridge and artificially-ruined keep – an enterprise vividly described not long ago in Robert Martin’s biography of the poet. Decades later, Charles’s nephew, the Poet Laureate, could pay no higher tribute to the late Prince Consort than by dedicating the first several Idylls of the King to his memory as ‘Scarce other than my king’s ideal ...”

“... Führer was too, and how both had been born out of a dog’s arse’. PFFFRRRRUMMMP! We remember Robert Graves’s poem, ‘Welsh incident’: ‘A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?’ ‘No, but a very loud, respectable noise – Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning ...’ But then, suddenly, ‘no more Vienna’. The Freuds are escaping from ...”

“... Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed at. Boyle’s American ...”

“... her own mother was ill – and took the opportunity to ditch her husband for the more magnetic Robert Bruce Lockhart. In this, as in most things, Moura Budberg’s behaviour was unusual. Even so, Mrs Alexander is right to speak of the strength of character which, like Natasha Ignatieff or Nabokov’s mother, she showed in adjusting to the loss of her ...”

“... The funicular railway takes you to the top of the mountain with the strange name: a nonsense word, a child’s burble, Tibidabo. You see the city of Barcelona spread out beneath you; beyond it the Mediterranean. Très beau panorama, the Michelin guide says, as well it may, since the name is not the nonsense word it looks but the Devil’s Latin, part of the sentence in which he offered to Christ the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me, ‘All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me ...”

“... he free-associates: on the rubber air hoses used by traffic engineers to monitor passing cars, Robert Boyle’s General History of the Air, the vacuum in an unopened jar of peanut butter, playing the French horn, personal ventilation jets on planes (‘a participatory jet engine for each passenger’); he ruminates, too, on the paedomorphosis of pet ...”

“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because ...”