“... be achieved, except with a hand mirror’), and made leery mock-bows at academic savants such as Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson (‘making us feel small, and breaking our heads for years with his “inis” and “iccios”’).This unflaggingly stylish and ebullient performance drew on a well-stocked wardrobe of roles. Early appearances regularly featured ...”

“... reasons for seeing off Siborne’s tin and lead Prussians – but not many. Blücher was hardly a knight in shining armour. He had wanted to follow up victory at Waterloo by sacking France as revenge for Austerlitz and Jena. And Wellington and his friends at court and in the cabinet remained wary of Prussian ambition long after 1815, preferring to cement ...”

“... in Brideshead: he approaches his maker with thoughts of the chapel, ‘the tombs, cross-legged knight and doubleted earl’, and of the good old days, ‘the days of wool shearing and the wide corn lands, the days of growth and building, when the marshes were drained and the waste land brought under the plough’. This is splendid schmaltz, like the Albert ...”

“... was even dressed up in drag by the princess and her girls for fun’. In Portrait of a Castrato, Roger Freitas writes that ‘contemporaries frequently regarded castrati as analogues to boys … The castrato does seem frequently to have taken the boy’s role in sodomitical sex.’ Thus castrati could shift and transform themselves. Everybody, it ...”

“... group, Graham’s poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Karl Weschke and Sven Berlin were forged by his understanding of their work: it was his dedication to art, rather than his own art, that impressed them. Hilton said he found Graham’s poems ‘too obscure’, provoking a ...”

“... Roger Penrose​ liked puzzles. In the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions can also be used to deceive – for example, to depict things that could not exist in three dimensions ...”

“... the glorious city of Cefalú, with its great Norman cathedral built in the 12th century by King Roger II, on the other the beetling cliffs and promontories of the cape. The Aeolian islands, once inhabited by the king of the winds who made the travels of Odysseus so troublesome, are imposing, beguiling forms on the near horizon. The town has always been an ...”

“... in or outside the courts. While ‘comming out of the church’ in Hunstanworth (Co. Durham), Roger Doon denied Anthony Ratcliff’s accusation that he was a thief. ‘Although ye be a gent., and I a poore man, my honestye shalbe as good as yours.’ Ratcliff was horrified: ‘What saith thou? Liknes thou thy honestye to myn?’ He ‘lyftyd up his hand ...”

“... communication through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the traffic.Roger Luckhurst’s ambitious and consistently informative cultural history of the corridor makes brief mention of The Maltese Falcon in accounting for film noir’s preoccupation with bleakly anonymous lobbies, passages and hallways. But it’s not the skills ...”

“... they are studying polished texts of the alliterative revival, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or of Richard II’s court, pre-eminently by Chaucer. But, though acknowledging that modern readers are trained to admire Chaucer best among writers of her period, Coleman spends little time on him, and grounds her discussion instead on a more workaday ...”

“... But the neighbouring streets still provide the decor of deprivation for photographers such as Roger Mayne: scorched curtains, three-legged prams, free-range, snot-rich urchins and, as the architect Peter Barber recalled with nostalgie de la boue, ‘an elderly woman who used to stand at her gate all day long and everybody knew what was going on on the ...”

“... and a harbinger of disorder. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a full-length biography since Roger Lockyer’s in 1981, but the 400th anniversary of James I’s death next year has given Hughes-Hallett her opportunity. At more than six hundred pages, The Scapegoat is long, but Buckingham’s rise and fall is told in a succession of short, vivid ...”

“... in France, his French marriages and susceptibility to Gallic culture. The Scottish historian Roger Mason has said that the 1550s saw the ‘establishment of what amounted to French colonial rule in Scotland’. Hutson obscures this story with her insular narrative, yet the English and the Scots were both impelled by wider conflicts.Confessional ...”

“... Russian writing failed to move with the times. I have seen Bulgakov described by his translator Roger Cockrell as a ‘Russian writer trapped in Soviet space’. Paustovsky seems not even to have been trapped. He is squarely of the 19th century, a Turgenevian or Chekhovian throwback.Chekhov, almost invariably, and not wrongly, is the point de repère for ...”

“... been playing, with, responsible for their suppression, the commissioner of police for Bruges, one Roger de Bris. This gives quiet pleasure as it’s also the name of the transvestite stage director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, who makes his appearance bare-shouldered and in a heavy ball gown. 7 March. Our pillar box is now emptied at 9 a.m. not by the ...”