“... Lawrence found in him the combined perfections of the finest Classical statues, and Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote as enthusiastically about him as he did about the Parthenon Marbles. Having taken separate moulds of all parts of Wilson’s body, Haydon conceived of a bolder plan and had him enclosed in a box into which he poured seven bushels of plaster of ...”

“... fact. It was a charge perfectly commonplace among all who knew Ford, friends as well as enemies. Robert Lowell, who met him through Allen Tate near the end of his life, quotes the story of Ford, an over-age wartime second lieutenant, playing golf with Lloyd George and giving the PM a piece of his mind on golfing etiquette: had he refrained, he told ...”

“... in 1700, but that had as much to do with his asthma as with his bent for reclusive philosophising. Robert Voitle’s meticulous 1984 biography suggests a bustling lord of the manor rather than an idle lover of landscapes. The estate was above all a large collection of farms, and their landlord seems to have been active, and rather enterprising, in ensuring ...”

“... the book undoubtedly gains in colour and atmosphere. It combines the authentic flavour of Robert Roberts’s The Classic Slum with the vigour and directness of Stephen Humphries’s Hooligans or Rebels? – yet at the same time shows greater objectivity and receptiveness to informants. It is a study well worth replicating elsewhere. There are few ...”

“... of a reformed sinner castigating his own erstwhile lapses’ – and variously attributed to Robert Henderson and Angus Morrison. Music Ho! is more accurately prophetic, too, than Motion allows. He deems rather improbable the hailing of Sibelius as avatar of the music of the future: yet Sibelius’s symphonic form-building is seen more clearly in its ...”

“... library. Convalescence was transformed by a gift from his cousin, a copy of The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson.These glimpses were a romance of the road. Adolfo was feeding me titbits from twice translated interviews. But his portrait of Vaes, so decisively sketched, fired my selective misreading. The fiction of our weary march is that ...”

“... with The Sportswriter, meaning that no event need be skipped. Alec, dancing with his ex-wife, may feel that ‘fifteen years are nothing,’ but fifteen years in these pages is long enough to contain a long prison sentence, subsequent rehabilitation and eventually the training required to answer phones as a Samaritan. It’s long enough for a mod to ...”

“... then flow out into us, in the audience. In Medea, the chorus tremble with fear at what Medea may be driven to do; they are also dismayed by their own powerlessness – the plight of all women. The conductors of our responses, they lead us to compassionate her, to use the Italianate word Mary Shelley gives the Creature when he begs Frankenstein to treat ...”

“... Tyndall’s fellow Queenwood teachers, Edward Frankland, had been invited to work with the chemist Robert Bunsen in Marburg, and in 1848 Tyndall decided to join him in Germany and study for a PhD, using his savings from railway surveying. In Marburg, he rose at 5 a.m., sitting in the cold in a dressing gown lined with cat fur, and worked on ...”

“... to face her in round two – but voters, especially on the left, were taken with this argument. Robert Hue, a former general secretary of the Communist Party, and Patrick Braouezec, a charismatic reformer, called on party members to vote for Macron in the first round, rather than Benoît Hamon, the winner of the PS primary, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the ...”

“... in their power … to confer upon you a certain favour, which if it does not cost you your life, may stick by you all your days.’The pox was also considered a badge of honour because it was associated with soldiers and sailors (men who were away from their wives for long periods and thought more likely to visit whorehouses and risk the ...”

“... naturally – to Sparta. Its catalogue of model leaders begins with the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, long idolised by McChrystal as a flawed but brilliant military commander, and moves on through a baffling assortment of characters ranging from Walt Disney and Coco Chanel (‘Founders’) to Martin Luther and Martin Luther King ...”

“... the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke ...”

“... popularity with her accession, it could take nothing for granted. It was less than a decade since Robert Peel had predicted that it would not last another five years, and while the violent civil disorder of the early 1830s had abated, there was still considerable ambivalence towards an institution whose incumbents in the two previous reigns had done much to ...”

“... the Jersey attacks, and Quint, the Ahab-style shark hunter played with scenery-chewing vigour by Robert Shaw in the film, is a veteran of the Indianapolis disaster. Benchley, Eilperin says, did more to instil ‘intense fear and hatred of sharks than anyone else in the 20th century’. By bringing an age-old nightmare to life, he ‘gave it a credibility, a ...”