“... that once she is raped Clarissa has no business doing anything except dying. And Donaldson quotes Robert Bage and Thomas Holcroft, lesser novelists than Richardson, but also less extreme in their dreams of women, willing to resist the notion of the fate worse than death. Hardy too, in Tess, offers a girl who is ruined and survives to die, Donaldson ...”

“... on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those cowboy hats from the States in 1900 when he was kitting out his nurses and constables in Africa. B.P. has recorded: ‘They were known in the trade as “Boss of the Plains” or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Yet, to his credit, Infantry Officer Sassoon had been entirely serious when he wrote his letter. Robert Graves and other friends understood that much, which was why they were so keen to get Sassoon certified as insane. If he was mad he could not be held responsible for his actions. So Macamble’s advice makes perfectly good sense. For Sherston to be proved ...”

“... Wordsworth’s genius lay in its own sort of negative capability. The most striking feature of his poetry, as of his personality, is their intense and intimate relations with what always remained outside them. He never seems identified with his own discoveries, even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a nod to the 1971 movie The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, one of the many adaptations of Robert Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, also a major influence on Night of the Living Dead). An enormous wall has been built across Manhattan, along Canal Street, and the area south of it, Zone One, is being cleared of undead to make it safe again for human ...”

“... did so on the ground that its deviousness was a matter for political debate, not for adjudication. Robert Stevens in his book The English Judges comments that my decision did not endear me to ministers, but I doubt that allowing judicial review to proceed would have been more likely to earn their gratitude. Judges who sit in the Administrative Court could give ...”

“... a hundred years after the introduction of limited liability, by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Merton, who showed that the equity of a limited liability company could be valued as if it were a financial option – that is, an instrument which offers rights over the future fruits of the company’s assets. This option has value – in the jargon, it ...”

“... missionaries, to which Parliament responded in 1868 by authorising a punitive expedition. General Robert Napier raised 13,000 troops, 20,000 logistic personnel, many thousands of mules and camels and 44 elephants in India, and shipped them to the Red Sea. After marching 780 miles overland to Tewodros’s capital, he defeated the imperial army (with the loss ...”

“... Second World War, Leo Steinberg wrote with equal insight on 20th-century innovators like Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and Old Masters like Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Velázquez. Yet this traffic is busier than ever before, according to Nagel, with art historians such as Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp and Georges Didi-Huberman at work on ...”