“... spears at the British. Individual British deaths were taken very seriously. After Lieutenant Robert Grenfell was hacked to death during the cavalry charge at Omdurman, his brother’s angry account of it spurred the men inspecting the wasted battlefield to ‘polish off the wounded and dangerous Dervishes with their bayonets in a very determined ...”

“... and to carry the audience by theatre when fact and logic weakened. It was even possible, as Robert Brentano demonstrated in a brilliant essay on Stubbs in the Journal of British Studies (May 1967), to carry an audience by appealing to its national sense of sound. Problems will inevitably arise when tradition slides into advocacy or when the health of a ...”

“... Ralph Lingen, who remembered him from Balliol as indolent and egocentric, and the famous albino, Robert Lowe, disliked his ideas and delayed his promotions. That was sometimes understandable. Arnold spoke out publicly against Lowe’s notorious and successful scheme for payment by results. They could not block all his appointments – for example, the ...”

“... style in comparable passages. Raban weaves in phrases from other Americans as well: Henry James, Robert Lowell, further bits from T. S. Eliot. At the end of his penultimate chapter Raban prints the note he received from Boom-Boom Kelley when he and his boat detached themselves from Kelley’s tow. ‘It was the one certificate which I had most wanted to ...”

“... appropriate bonhomie to a gentleman’s confidences: ‘You may be thinking that when Myrtle and Robert made up to each other I made fun of it, and that when Myrtle made up tome I solemnly took it all in. You are quite right.’ With a little practice, of course, one comes to respond to this respectful consideration. The cosseted reader starts to enjoy, not ...”

“... certainly shouldn’t have sold it to me. Three years ago, in a television interview, the doughty Robert McKenzie tried to extract from Ingrams the theoretical basis for his bedroom coverage. Ingrams began by declaring piously that he wouldn’t go into someone’s private life just for the sake of it: but added that with politicians ‘one cannot make a ...”

“... William Sullivan, who was then in the midst of a power struggle with J. Edgar Hoover, to visit Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, and warn him, as Mardian later testified, that Hoover could not be trusted and might try to blackmail Nixon, as he had blackmailed other Presidents, because of the wiretap ...”

“... lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in the same year. A similar weariness infuses the faces of Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard in their 1944 portraits; but the relationship between these ...”

“... He then seems to have become involved with serious thinkers abroad, like Henry Oldenburg and Robert Boyle. We know that in The Hague he discussed philosophy with the libertines Charles Saint-Evremond and Henry Morelli, with Leibniz, and with people around the Prince de Condé. In the last four years of his life, when he was living in the home of the ...”

“... for a few hundred feet? How do you explain the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth, and the American Robert Goddard, who pursued the mad ambition of space with rockets that lifted themselves only a few yards, before collapsing under their own contradictions? Even more remarkable are the interlinked stories of the two men who actually took humans into ...”

“... looks at how entrepreneurs produced a national literary heritage. The bookseller and self-made man Robert Dodsley, treated as a vulgar functionary by his authors, is, in Brewer’s eyes, a hero of literature. John Bell, cashing in on the end of perpetual copyright to produce elegant anthologies of poetry and drama, had more influence on the formation of a ...”

“... with (and even now to require) active state intervention, social reform and higher taxes. Robert Morier even sought to reconcile Free Trade with Empire (an Empire bound together by ties of sentiment and affection rather than by material economic interests). Thus reinvigorated, it had no difficulty in seeing off the fair trade and bimetallist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”