“... certificate, on which her father claimed Durban as his birthplace, and a journalist called Robert Greer as his father. She sought his traces in the usual formal registers of Tasmania, where he had grown up, Victoria and South Africa. She pursued the Greers of the world backward through Griers, Griersons, Gregors and Macgregors to the kith of Scottish ...”

“... like the warehouse on the previous page here, it is part of a fine series of photographs by Robert Morrow). Davis is at his best on the arsenal of repressive techniques designed to keep the have-nots at bay or under control, from the architecture of Frank Gehry to the geosynchronous spy satellite and other high-tech surveillance demanded by the police ...”

“... control was not sanctioned by the Bible. In the growth of the breakaway church Glas’s son-in-law Robert Sandeman played a seminal role: writing, travelling (even to America), and establishing a certain doctrinal identity by contesting the Calvinist doctrine of ‘imputed righteousness’, whereby God supposedly attributed Christ’s righteousness to the ...”

“... Two of Britain’s largest remaining nationalised industries – the Church of England and the National Health Service – have recently acquired new bosses who have publicly declared that the Nineties will be a decade of major change. This has set me wondering what kind of reaction George Carey might expect if the plans he had in mind for his own organisation were at all like those being implemented under William Waldegrave ...”

“... water on the side of a narrow-boat during a family holiday with another Tory MP, the somewhat wet Robert Atkins. During that trip he asked Mr Atkins point blank whether there was any realistic possibility of him becoming prime minister. Anderson records that the two men decided there and then that there was, but that his best tactic was to avoid being ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher. He not only recites the well-known story of Harold Macmillan’s cuckolding by Robert Boothby but indulges himself in fascinated gossip about who then got Sara Macmillan (or Boothby) pregnant, driving her to alcoholism and an early death. Junor’s patron, Lord Beaverbrook, receives a full working-over. He apparently insisted at one time ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cock is a steroid for the hormonal crisis currently under way in American bookshops. 1992 has Robert Bly and his middle-aged Boy Scouts leaping through forests dressed in feathers and pounding drums to scare the furry creatures, consecrate testosterone, and push the sale of Iron John. In Revolution From Within, Campfire Girl Gloria Steinem chronicles her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... finance: namely, that the monarch became a taxpayer. In 1842, the then Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, reintroduced income tax, which had previously been levied on a temporary basis during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Queen was determined – or advised, the documentation is incomplete – that ‘her own income should be subject to a ...”

“... a world rather than report on one. To those like the absurdly tortuous, sulky and by now moribund Robert de Montesquiou, quick to pick out members of his own plush acquaintance among the novel’s characters (though seemingly blind to any resemblance between himself and the monstrous Charlus, whom he sees rather as a descendant of Balzac’s sinister ...”

“... and aggression is to be highly valued – in the dog-eat-dog world of the Stock Exchange and in Robert Bly’s drum-beating – then Woman is made to correspond with tameness. Woman becomes despised, dull domesticity. Woman is too much civilisation, the doilies and anti-macassars of Home. Yet commercial mythology cannot get rid of the myth of Home. For one ...”

“... Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of misleading editing by Lewis Dabney, who divides the book into 19 sections and dozens of ...”

“... but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade books of exemplary jokiness). Unreadability, McGann says, can be a virtue. The poems of Emily Dickinson, unpublished in her lifetime, test editorial practice. McGann’s ...”