“... naturally – to Sparta. Its catalogue of model leaders begins with the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, long idolised by McChrystal as a flawed but brilliant military commander, and moves on through a baffling assortment of characters ranging from Walt Disney and Coco Chanel (‘Founders’) to Martin Luther and Martin Luther King ...”

“... Rakosi (another Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a diverse lot, although most of them incorporated key elements of the ...”

“... the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke ...”

“... simulos’); one president has converted, another is in jail. It is a vision not unlike that in Robert Bly’s recent poem ‘After Reading “The Sleepers”’: The corporate criminal sleeps in his cell, Our dim-witted president, out of touch with reality, sleeps . . . The Iraqi whose house was destroyed sleeps in a room elsewhere with fifty ...”

“... his father’s lies, his father’s claims? He had a daft but harmless idea that he looked like Robert Mitchum; no one else could see any resemblance. But then gradually, he prevailed on other people, so that when, after his death, Burnside met his drinking mates, they were amazed that the boy had never spotted the likeness. They talked, these bar-room ...”

“... unlawful command influence on the part of Fort Carson’s commanding officer, Major-General Robert Mixon. The witness said he had overheard one colonel tell another that General Mixon was unhappy with the lenient outcomes of some recent courts martial, and that jurors who were ‘bleeding heart liberals’ had contributed to the problem. The ...”

“... and his patients included Pope, Gay, Beau Nash, Richardson, the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, Robert Walpole’s adolescent daughter, Catherine (who died under Cheyne’s care of something resembling anorexia nervosa), and the Earl of Chesterfield (who passed Cheyne’s advice ineffectively on to his ‘dear boy’). Cheyne’s dietary advice was ...”

“... the sleazy stories about bonking bimbos achieved a dominant influence in the circulation charts. Robert Maxwell, who bought the Mirror in 1984, did not attempt to reverse the vulgarisation process; when he was not rifling the pension fund he seemed to be chiefly interested in getting a picture of himself in every issue. But in the last few years, under ...”

“... Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s sometime collaborator Christopher Middleton edited another in the much missed Cape Editions in 1968. Yet these did not gain Trakl the attention he deserves. It is odd that an English sensibility so well attuned to Sylvia ...”

“... Hollinghurst, the films of Derek Jarman, Mark Merlis’s American Studies and An Arrow’s Flight, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and, above all, Neil Bartlett’s inexhaustible Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde as well as his more recent Mr Clive and Mr Page; all of which use the past to redefine gay existence ...”

“... Art in New York put on a solo exhibition of his work, and he founded Magnum with three others: Robert Capa, David Seymour (known as ‘Chim’) and George Rodger. When he saw his friend’s show in New York, Capa advised Cartier-Bresson to be cautious. ‘You will be labelled the little surrealist photographer,’ he wrote: ‘you will be lost, and will ...”

“... statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to support the notion. D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Rudyard Kipling all picked up the idea, so that by the early 20th century, Mircea Eliade commented: ‘A “search for the Mother” had become a major component of the “unconscious nostalgias of the Western intellectual”.’ The only such ...”

“... popularity with her accession, it could take nothing for granted. It was less than a decade since Robert Peel had predicted that it would not last another five years, and while the violent civil disorder of the early 1830s had abated, there was still considerable ambivalence towards an institution whose incumbents in the two previous reigns had done much to ...”

“... the Jersey attacks, and Quint, the Ahab-style shark hunter played with scenery-chewing vigour by Robert Shaw in the film, is a veteran of the Indianapolis disaster. Benchley, Eilperin says, did more to instil ‘intense fear and hatred of sharks than anyone else in the 20th century’. By bringing an age-old nightmare to life, he ‘gave it a credibility, a ...”

“... Except for sex, the self-conscious rock and roll wild man is always ready to make his mark. When Robert Stigwood failed to pay up after a series of concerts, he got trapped on a staircase and kneed by Keith 16 times, one for each grand owed. Not that Stigwood apologised (‘Maybe I didn’t kick him hard enough’). Occasionally, he’s a little coy. His ...”