“... the lovers, presumably because the neighbours supported them. For ‘the Space of Six weekes’, Robert Harwood was to have ‘full free and perfect Liberty (bringing one or more of the Neighbours with him) to have all freedom of discourse with said Elizabeth Gary and to use all faire and Lawfull Endeavours with her to Marry or Contract Marriage ... one or ...”

“... wit and humour to protect itself against the failure of its search; and what the art critic Robert Hughes calls (in a different context) a ‘prophylactic irony’ to obscure the poet’s exact attitude to his statements, making his own uncertainty itself uncertain. Such games, and indeed such rigours, are quite unnecessary to a work like Omeros whose ...”

“... to terms with his own sexuality. There are villains: Dr Henderson, Pollock’s Jungian analyst, Robert Motherwell, Clement Greenberg; and heroes and heroines: the sad, remote father, the brothers, particularly Sande, and his wife Arloie, Reuben Kadish, Roger Wilcox, Rita Benton. They write with respect about Lee Krasner and without parti pris. My impression ...”

“... to tell. Naturally he is scathing about the British (and foreign) banks’ lavishing of money on Robert Maxwell twenty years after the Board of Trade had stigmatised him as unfit to run a public company; hundreds of non-bankers could have told them he was a crook. But Taylor’s book makes clear that this sort of misjudgment is what one should expect from ...”

“... him as politically more intransigent than less mystic opponents of the Tory war regime. He pursued Robert and Leigh Hunt venomously, for having taken his paintings of Nelson and Pitt to be icons of reaction (a mistake, if it was one – Blake himself never said so – shared by not a few art historians), accusing them of responsibility for a war they were more ...”

“... with Christopher Hill, the Balliol historian. When Dell’s Committee began its work it picked Robert Neild at Cambridge as its adviser but Balogh, who was worried that ‘the fucking shits will get away with it,’ got his Balliol colleague, Andrew Graham, to brief Neild. The Committee’s report was a landmark. It angrily pointed out that ‘the first ...”

“... it had to be provided with the discipline of its own market economy: such was the conviction of Robert Lowe, Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education under Palmerston, not a businessman, indeed one who thought that the narrowness of businessmen’s views inhibited their effective action, but roped in by Searle to represent that political ...”

“... via the New Yorkers, to strike a chord with a younger generation of poets such as John Forbes, Robert Adamson and John Tranter, who included the entire sequence in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (co-edited with Philip Mead) published last year. In their introduction to the volume they argue that ‘these unsettling works of the imagination ...”

“... nor the fields of the Somme enjoyed much dignity either. Dr Nuland’s brother and his patient Robert De-Matteis managed to salvage some of their humanity despite their front-line positions – the brother managed a farewell kiss, DeMatteis a wonderful family Christmas – but this was because of the resilience of their souls in the face of ...”

“... of spill. Sunset. Departure ‘in teeth of surmised streamers’. ‘The weasel,’ according to Robert Graves, ‘a favourite disguise of Thessalian witches ... called cedro, usually translated “the artful one”.’ Prynne’s art is in the sanguine play of breath, the repetitions: ‘she, she, she, and only she’. All he requires of us is an ...”

“... source of metaphors in transactions between the sexes, also touched on in a new book by Robert Erickson) in their exercises or boasts of sexual tyranny, in ways which sometimes go beyond the idiomatic or poetic commonplace and acquire an air of formal ideologising.† Richardson was driven by a restless over-explicitness which sometimes builds into ...”

“... being drawn into Kim Novak in Vertigo is a model of the way we are sucked into films. Charming Robert Walker and boring Farley Granger make a trap for our need to identify. The method of Rear Window – a voyeur in the dark inspecting other lives – is the principle of cinematic spectacle. Hitchcock’s best films all grow out of his instinctive ...”

“... in Michael Collins. None matters much to me nor, it seems, have any mattered to the Irish public. Robert Kee put it well when he wrote that the film’s intentions were honest and its central themes ‘historically wholly acceptable’. Not for the first time, however, Kee is in a minority position. The film’s historical compression has been transformed by ...”

“... 1985. At this point the novel received a huge boost. An Aryan Nation group under the leadership of Robert (‘Bob’) Jay Matthews embarked on a series of terrorist actions against what they called ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government, culminating, in June 1984, in the assassination of the Denver talk-show host, Alan Berg (‘a pushy Jew’). Matthews had ...”

“... only other living French novelist I would compare with her as a source of intelligent pleasure, Robert Pinget.) She went about literature slowly once she had taken to it. Tropisms, her first book, was not published until 1939, seven years after she began writing it. It is a sparse but mordant collection of short scenes of social exchange whose ordinariness ...”