“... did not ideally suit him to army life. Nor did things improve when his friend Major-General Sir Robert Laycock arranged for his transfer from the Commandos to the Guards. If anything, his time in the Guards was even less happy than his spell as a Marine. When his superior officer, Lord Lovat, who had seen him drunk in the bar at White’s every day of the ...”

“... can see, was a Ulysses of the Dantean phase, with an unappeasable hunger for wilder shores. In Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins the hero makes landfall in the Antarctic; where the inhabitants, like the fish of the Southern Hemisphere, can fly. There he falls in love with the beautiful Youwarkee, who falls to earth outside his hut. Strange remote stuff, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In the late summer of 1984, dissidents began to appear in Yorkshire itself: Ken Foulstone and Robert Taylor, miners at Manton colliery, petitioned to be allowed to return to work and had the strike declared unlawful, both in Yorkshire and nationally. These men and others like them were helped by a network of ‘advisers’, shadowy at first but ...”

“... to the textbook view that John Locke’s contractual theory of government simply demolished Robert Filmer’s efforts at assimilating the authority of kings and fathers, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government did not drive patriachal ideas out of circulation. Indeed, it was Locke who was hardly read in the early 18th century: his ideas struck no ...”

“... Smollett can often have been rated an enemy in the new age. ‘I want Smollet’s works,’ wrote Robert Burns, ‘for the sake of his incomparable humor.’1 And he may also have wanted them for their romantic intervals. Smollett was, in fact, to imitate the inimitable Cervantes for the rest of his life. He translated him, then re-translated him in a ...”

“... not base a car plant in Britain if Labour won the election, which was a lie; the Express said that Robert Hughes MP was affiliated to the Soviet Friendship Society, which was another lie; the Sun tried to swing the Chesterfield by-election with a fraudulent ‘psychiatric analysis’ of Tony Benn. Henry Porter, once again displaying a complete disregard for ...”

“... intense awareness and a habit of self-expression have been common in the history of the sport. Robert Graves climbed difficult routes in Snowdonia with Mallory just before the Great War and was told by Geoffrey Winthrop Young that he had ‘the finest natural balance’ he had ever seen in a climber. At the height of his enthusiasm he wrote that climbing ...”

“... May 1915 saw the end of the last purely Liberal government in Britain. October 1964 saw the defeat of the last aristocrat to head a Conservative government by a Labour Party dedicated to regenerating the country through the ‘white heat of technology’. Each event marked, in its way, a decline of power. The first saw the disappearance of a liberal individualist state, governed by a caste of liberal individualist gentlemen ...”

“... Indeed, the first English ruler to rule in defiance of gentry opinion as a whole was probably Sir Robert Peel, and his rule did not survive the experience. Not fighting a civil war, even more than a royal victory in one, would have left these facts unshaken. Similarly, no number of military victories was ever going to eradicate either the Prayer Book or the ...”

“... instance, a Neo-Classical design, and, if you view things from the other angle, how much hangs on Robert Venturi producing something authoritative for the corner of Trafalgar Square. W.R. Lethaby was, on the face of it, Richard Rogers’s opposite: clever, always top of his class, and a prize-winning draughtsman. He was born in Barnstaple, the son of Bible ...”

“... from One Hundred Years of Solitude (‘by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’) and Robert Lowell’s ‘Caracas’. Yet at no point does Miss Didion give a sense of being someone who uses literature as a constant model or ideal, something shored up against the randomness and babble that is fundamental to her distress. When Miss Didion herself ...”

“... don’t make the house, or the grey-green ice, any less real. History gnaws. History shat on Robert, the older twin by ten minutes. I want, he said in a foolish bloodthirsty dialectical moment, to see the blood of social change swirl around my ankles. Standing at the back of a crowd listening to a speaker at the Karl Marx Hof, he was trampled to death ...”

“... Casting Against the Part and it’s almost a parlour game; a winning combination would be, say, Robert Morley as Andrew Aguecheek. All of which is to do an injustice to Kenneth More, who was a fine naturalistic actor, and although he had never stepped outside his genial public stereotype, Patrick Garland and I both thought that if he could be persuaded to ...”

“... career. The two concepts serve in different ways to assert a high standard of social democracy. Robert Anderson’s Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland does not destroy these beliefs, but he shows that the latter one was true only in a very limited state, and that many people were determined to keep it limited. The 19th-century middle class was ...”