“... Sprinklings of pseudo-Hebrew here and there added to the mystique. When the former army chaplain Robert Bacon visited the ‘Shakers’ God’, John Robins, in London in around 1650, he found Robins sitting on a bed before his disciples speaking in tongues: ‘But the words he spake I did not understand, only they seemed to me to be a mixture of Latin, and ...”

“... had an urge to repudiate his audience.Mann is at his best recounting the speed with which the young Brando went from the New School to playing Stanley Kowalski. His progress was spurred by two people. Stella Adler was an actress and a dynamic teacher of acting. She fell for Brando and his chronic originality. Her approach had two anchors: respect the text ...”

“... a man called Warner who lived in Normandy wrote a very dirty Latin poem. Addressed to Archbishop Robert of Rouen, it relates the adventures of an Irish grammarian called Moriuht, who has a series of graphic and often disturbing sexual encounters while searching for his wife, who has been kidnapped. He is captured by Vikings, chained, flogged, urinated ...”

“... only six years ago; and ‘thick and fast they come at last,’ like Lewis Carroll’s oysters.) Robert Alter has not followed her example, but instead takes time to discuss the major works from the point of view of content, style, technique etc, when he reaches that point in Stendhal’s life at which they were written. This means that the chronological ...”

“... figure, and in Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood play within a play, The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, a ‘real-life’ Skelton takes the role of Friar Tuck. His recovery came on the back of the rise of Modernism, with its opening of readers’ minds to new kinds of non-traditional poetry, and it was confirmed with the appearance of ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... Thomson’s time, and it was the place where Dr Johnson first heard the Erse language, sung by a young woman at the spinning-wheel. In those days, it struck most visitors as a squalid little place, its standing as a Royal Burgh an irony. In the 19th century, however, the railway arrived and Nairn developed into a mildly celebrated place of retirement and ...”

“... but of symbolic logic). Such an acquiescence in classical models is scarcely surprising since, as Robert Skidelsky clearly demonstrates, there was virtually nothing in the world before 1914 to suggest to an academic liberal of Keynes’s background that the classical economic system had failed or broken down. Keynes’s economics before 1914 were therefore ...”

“... Johnny to the church rather than the police, and a struggling artist (ludicrously overplayed by Robert Newton) drags Johnny back to his room in order to paint him, hoping to ratchet up a failing talent by catching the light in a dying man’s eyes. This is where things go half-baked. In Johnny’s delirium, pictured as a J. Arthur Rank version of ...”

“... the Frost of the anthologies, the author of ‘guidebooks for the spirit of individualism’, as Robert Faggen puts it, attracted to empty woods and roads less travelled, and suspicious of New Deals and other easy offers of a lift. But real individualists don’t read guidebooks, and Frost wasn’t writing them. On receiving the Emerson-Thoreau medal in ...”

“... In​ 1824, a Scottish merchant called Robert Hunter was sailing down the Mekong when he saw what Yunte Huang describes as a ‘two-headed Hydra-like creature’ climbing into a dinghy. On closer inspection, Hunter was astonished to discover ‘not some amphibious reptile’ but two identical young boys connected at the chest by a thick band of flesh ...”

“... also true that a relief expedition has been hacking through textbook surveys for several decades. Robert Butts and Walter Cannon have called attention to the scientific and philosophical contributions of the ‘Cambridge Network’ – men like William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, Charles Babbage, George Airy, John Herschel and John Henslow. Some half-dozen pieces ...”

“... he had been estranged. Trollope, as strict in his daily routine as Anny was chaotic, welcomed the young women into his ‘sweet old prim, chill house wrapped in snow’. Tennyson was a close friend, and the Isle of Wight, where Anny and Minny were sheltered by the irrepressible Julia Margaret Cameron, became a lifelong refuge. Anny relished the island ...”

“... Mythology was once defined by Robert Graves as the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that he cannot believe them to be true. Mythical stories are disturbing and invite disbelief; but our own myths are so taken for granted as to be largely invisible. Conventional encyclopedias of mythology exclude Biblical narratives ...”

“... More than fifty years have elapsed since G.M. Young published his splendidly suggestive survey of Victorian England, Portrait of an Age, and the confidence and command which enabled that book to be written seem to become ever more elusive. The exponential growth of the academic profession, and the sheer volume of relevant material and accumulated images, have ensured that our detailed knowledge about this period has advanced enormously since Young’s day ...”