“... and the modern political party was his home. Others, like the Italian sociologist Robert Michels, argued further that for the modern politician the political party was a form of social mobility, so that eventually the protection of the party’s bureaucratic structures – the machine – became more important than the interests of the people ...”

“... say, catching an old fish and staring at it and then just letting it go? As Elizabeth Bishop told Robert Lowell, ‘I find I’m really a minor female ...”

“... we drop down into Kendal and the Abbot Hall gallery, where there is a touring exhibition of Robert Bevan pictures. The shows at Abbot Hall are just the right size, and never more than three or four rooms. The Bevans are shown alongside other Camden Town paintings, the best of which is a lovely, glowing, slightly abstract picture by Spencer Gore, The ...”

“... to Montagu, this was no cause for alarm: the cost and ratio of raw footage to edited film for Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran were similar. Because the film had to be sent back to Hollywood for processing, Eisenstein never had access to rushes; so he filmed more takes than he would have needed, just in case. Never having made a film before, the Sinclairs ...”

“... as the mark of an inexperienced and artless ruling class. Even an avowed originalist like Robert Bork, unsuccessfully nominated by Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1987, concedes that ‘self-confident legal institutions do not require so much talking about.’ But Scalia and Bork forged their ideas in battle against a liberal jurisprudence that was ...”

“... an ungrand dismissal of himself: ‘Read Eliot and Pound. Read Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell, whether or not under the sign of Eliot and Pound.’ What Empson wonderfully said of Eliot, quoted in this book, could be said of Ricks by many people, at least of my generation, who read literature at university, or who just read: ‘I do not know ...”

“... later reflected, that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played ...”

“... system, you often find that you are, as it were, loosening your imagination.’I feel sympathy for Robert Southey, whose excerpts from his voracious reading were posthumously published in four volumes as Southey’s Common-Place Book. He confessed in 1822 that,Like those persons who frequent sales, and fill their houses with useless purchases, because they may ...”

“... have shown that the results more than justify the dangers of this method. At the same time, as Robert Fowler wrote in ‘Herodotus and His Contemporaries’ (1996), he had – in addition to Homer, elegiac and lyric poets and Athenian dramatists to give him patterns of narrative and characterisation – many now largely lost Ionian prose writers, mostly ...”

“... without being confined to them. But larger centres have their filmographies too: Marseille in Robert Guédiguian’s movies; Bordeaux in Moderato cantabile, Nice in Baie des anges; Lyon in Melville’s L’Armée des ombres; Lille in Zonca’s La Vie rêvée des anges. In such cases, the location of novels and films is precise and explicit, each accorded ...”

“... One day it will find a voice, but the fact that the ruling ANC has never unequivocally disavowed Robert Mugabe’s ‘fast-track land reform’, a land grab in all but name, isn’t reassuring. South Africa – more populous, urbanised and industrialised, among many other differences – is certainly not Zimbabwe, but Zimbabwe was the South Africa of the ...”

“... White’s face that challenges the viewer. ‘Black and white are the colours of photography,’ Robert Frank once remarked. ‘To me they symbolise the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. Most of my photographs are of people; they are seen simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street. There is one thing the ...”

“... Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci; the American neoconservatives Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer; and – the maître à penser of the ‘Eurabia genre’ – Gisèle Littman, a British woman of Egyptian-Jewish origin who lives in Switzerland and publishes under the pseudonym Bat Ye’or. (It’s striking how many Eurabia theorists write under ...”

“... on its masthead. Pseudonyms were popular at the time: Godard liked Hans Lucas, Truffaut went for Robert Lachenay or François de Montferrand, Chabrol called himself Jean-Yves Goutte. But for Rohmer the game was also a necessary act of concealment. He had been using a variety of false names since arriving in Paris: he was Gilbert Cordier for his novel ...”

“... to Blackstone and Pope to Pitt; and at Kenwood in Hampstead he constructed a mansion, designed by Robert Adam, and a park which remain a high point of British design. Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then ...”