“... has heard of: ‘The Hymn to Na’ra’yena’, by the Orientalist Sir William Jones; two poems by Robert Merry and William Parsons, members of the ‘Della Cruscan’ school of English expatriates in Florence; and ‘Soliloquy’ by Ann Yearsley, also known as the Bristol Milkwoman. It’s a micro-anthology of marginal materials by four newcomers (though ...”

“... Dickinson’s perception of what Heidegger terms the ‘ontic’ character of the world; like Robert Browning, she employs organ music as a metaphor for consciousness as process. Dickinson’s poems are impatient of ideas of rational control and unambiguous meaning. They push language to its limits and disrupt standard grammar, syntax and typography (her ...”

“... the cinema-owners; the idiocy involved in cutting films down, etc.’ An essay from 1976 praising Robert Altman’s Nashville begins with two and a half pages of honest rage at the philistine state of German film criticism, which has dwindled to the status of the listings guide. ‘As this sort of criticism writes about films only as something that you ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gather from his letters to them – or to close English friends like Charles Milnes Gaskell, Sir Robert Cuncliffe and Cecil Spring Rice – that the gamut of writers he casually and aptly quoted or alluded to seriously engaged him. Not one letter contains an extended passage on a literary work. His test for a storyteller, a ‘trivial sort of animal’, was ...”

“... national states inaugurated by 1789.Perhaps the man who has done most to turn the page on 1789 is Robert Badinter, the quietly-spoken Jewish civil rights lawyer who was Mitterrand’s Minister of Justice from 1981 to 1986. M. Badinter was not a member of the Socialist Party, but he stuck to his libertarian principles with such bravery than many within the PS ...”

“... is unambiguously bad for growth but below which it is even slightly beneficial. Another study, by Robert Barro, finds that at levels below 15 per cent the effect on growth, though negative, is statistically insignificant (since the study was published in the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, however, its author has thought it prudent to cite the average ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It’s a dependable party game: who was the MP who sat from 1950 to 1987, emerged as a strong and early opponent of hanging and supported homosexual law reform; was fiercely anti-Nato, anti-American and opposed to Britain possessing nuclear weapons; pioneered the Clean Air Act, vociferously opposed subsidies to farmers, attacked the monopoly of the big drug firms as suppliers to the NHS and was the first person to take the anti-smoking cause to the Cabinet; became a vehement critic of Empire and hugely embarrassed a Tory government by a passionate condemnation of British treatment of Africans confined in the Hola Camp in Kenya? (The MP in question was so infuriated by the racist excuse that different standards applied in Africa that he/she actually cried with vexation at the end of the speech ...”

“... well above the knee’. That, too, is familiar. In They Came like Swallows, the older boy, Robert, is a natural athlete, but one of his legs has been amputated and he wears a false limb. And in So Long, See You Tomorrow, the narrator describes how, when his brother undressed at night, ‘he left his artificial leg leaning against a chair.’ In that ...”

“... well, since the tale is in substance almost unbearably violent and cruel, a manifestation of what Robert Frost calls ‘design of darkness to appal’. The central figure, Yoshihide, is a painter, a wholly disagreeable man who loves only two things: his art and his daughter. The daughter is a Lady-in-Waiting to the Grand Lord of Horikawa, whose particular ...”

“... relationships preserved, disputes prevented, standards upheld. ‘Over our community,’ wrote Robert Roberts of the Edwardian Salford slum, ‘the matriarchs stood guardians, but not creators, of the group conscience and as such possessed a sense of social propriety as developed and unerring as any clique of Edwardian dowagers.’ It was the same at the ...”

“... King was relevant to the killings in Vietnam. (I don’t know whether, or how, the shooting of Robert Kennedy was relevant: it may have been done by the Mafia.) In West Germany, that April, a student protester was shot, as a scapegoat: a dissident from East Germany, with Protestant Christian beliefs, Rudi Dutschke survived the attack for 11 ...”

“... arrange it, before emerging a free and in Thatcher’s eyes dangerously attractive man.) There was Robert Armstrong, saving her from this fiasco, if not from one of her more ridiculous but sinister attempts to sustain state secrecy – but all the while murmuring that he thought Aids the greatest challenge to any government in his lifetime. And then as the ...”

“... of the Union, wrote a few articles on economics, inherited the college fellowship of his tutor, Robert Hall, taught (inter alios) the undergraduate Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and entered Parliament in 1950 as MP for South Gloucester. It was a swashbuckling rise by a young man full of glamour. ‘I am more fond and proud of that young man than I can put into ...”