“... 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 ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”

“... is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the travails of his final weeks. Ostwald’s is the first study that tries not ...”

“... His birth certificate, which Mantle hasn’t bothered to examine, shows that his father, William Robert Archer, lived at 48 Highbury Grove, then a North London boarding-house owed by one Mrs Rhoda Bowness. His occupation is given as ‘journalist’. The mother, Lola Howard Archer, lived separately over the Thames at a now-vanished address in Southwark ...”

“... neurophysiology carried out in the Sixties. It was then that Hobson and his long-time collaborator Robert McCarley decided to pursue their interest in the regulation of sleep and dreaming by intensively studying neurons located in the brainstem, the phylogenetically-older brain structure which sits at the base of our hypertrophied cerebral hemispheres. Ideally ...”

“... in 1935: ‘My heart always warms to people who do not come to see me, especially Americans.’ To Robert Bridges there is a judicious criticism of Hopkins (sprung rhythm is not difficult to write well, but Hopkins writes it badly) and he thanks Witter Bynner for admiring ‘my poems even more than I admire them myself’. The show-off element is strong, and ...”

“... reading the newspapers of the time can have something of the same effect, as is well conveyed by Robert Kee’s The World We Left behind. But it’s not the same as a single person’s day-by-day account of – not, of course, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but – what it eigentlich felt like to that person. The dilemma is whether publication should or ...”