“... of analytically enlightened sketch-scholars (Alan Tyson, Joseph Kerman, Douglas Johnson, Robert Winter, William Kinderman, Barry Cooper) is to such venal misprisions a corrective of which the beleaguered Beethoven may have hardly dared to ...”

“... contributed to the undermining of Britishness. One reason for this, as the Party’s historian Robert Blake comments, is that Tories have always tended towards English nationalism, enjoying electoral paramountcy in the Southern counties, but possessed of far less secure roots in the North or in Wales or in Scotland. Predictably, therefore, the recent ...”

“... means or another. Despite the many who hated him, he died in bed. For I refer, of course, to Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1722 to 1742, architect of the Whig supremacy, hammer of the Tories. His long tenure of power reminds us that Britain’s much-vaunted two-party system has in the past often given way in practice to something approximating to a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The visual package in this book might once have been marketed to showcase a selection of poems by Robert Frost. The text is calm and informative, and quietly redundant – like Norman Mailer’s overwrought rhetoric polyfilling a collection of Marilyn Monroe pin-ups. Guiltily, we thirst for something wilder, more fearful. Though, in fairness, several ...”

“... monkeys, the poor little monkeys!” – his nickname for Gracie and Katie. In the next room Robert was sitting with a book open pretending to read.’ All those ailments from a different era: ulceration of the retina, internal inflammation, sick headaches, Valentine’s Meat Juice as a remedy for Edward’s abscess on his tooth, the typhoid that left ...”

“... and (unlike the British) cruel. In the half-paragraph he gives to Africa, he quotes the missionary Robert Macgregor, explorer of the Niger, welcoming the arrival of the steam-driven gunboat, ‘carrying the glad tidings of “peace and goodwill to all men” into the dark places of the earth which are now filled with cruelty’. Johnson endorses – or at ...”

“... with pleasure. Does the entire series survive in the BBC Sound Archive? We heard extracts (with Robert Speaight as Jesus) on the day Dr Reynolds’s book was published. A complete repetition of the plays would be a welcome change from most of what passes for religious broadcasting today and, come to that, from most of what passes for drama. In these ...”

“... reference-points have always been overwhelmingly literary. Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf and Robert Louis Stevenson appear in the first, short, paragraph of this book, and Auden, James and Flaubert have all made their appearance before the end of the second page. Re-reading The Uses of Literacy now, one notices that a work usually recalled for its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre writer. Her ways with rhythm and sound effects seem too spontaneous to be experimental, though they ...”

“... comparison with the English poet gives no idea of Magowan’s poetry, nor does this at the end of Robert Peters’s Introduction: ‘I am reminded, finally, of that stunning moment in Alfred Tennyson’s neglected masterpiece “Maud”, where his hero, confronting madness, meditates on the fragility of the human brain, seen via the image of a seashell. Like ...”

“... What is more important: is it the project of understanding why sexual desire is, or has become, a problem for us like no other, fraught with particular anxiety and special perplexity; or is it the task of establishing – maintaining, perhaps – principles according to which this desire can be regulated, guided, temporised? The change in relations between the sexes and the concomitant change in relations between members of the same sex, the double alteration that has come over us in the last two or three generations makes a certain kind of intellectual investigation possible for the first time ...”

“... philosophy. But Kant himself had written a less purely critical third Critique. In this, as Robert Solomon describes it in an accessible and entertaining new study of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Kant had returned to nature ‘not as the phenomenal world of the understanding and the causal laws of Newton’s physics, but as the “supersensible” universe ...”

“... the Tarot, the doctrines of Freud, Jung and the neo-Jungians, Reich and his orgone accumulators, Robert Graves in his White Goddess phase, and, underlying everything, a gynaecological psychology which attaches great importance to the menstrual cycle. When faced with such a dazzling embarrassment of riches it is often useful to inspect the boo-hurrah ...”