“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic ...”

“... understand, are the pure products of disordered digestion’. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton wrote that the stomach is the ‘king of the belly, because if he be distempered, all the rest suffer with him.’ Early 19th-century physicians agreed: ‘It is a great mistake to regard dyspepsia as peculiarly or especially a disease of the ...”

“... history of the universe for ever, whatever the nature of time, and that this is vastly important. Robert Frost comes a long way with Johnston, but is, in the end, even more strict: ‘There is no future life to defer to. I see all salvation limited to here and now.’ It makes the heart sink most strangely to consider those who do nothing but good in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mean that only oaths by the holy body were regarded as truly obscene in the 14th century. Robert of Brunne’s early 14th-century Handlyng Sinne does indeed have the Virgin say that those who swore by Christ’s body have torn the Christ child apart, and that thought is echoed by Chaucer’s Pardoner. But Chaucer’s actual representation of swearing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I ...”

“... his orders as with unpleasant medicine.’ Augustine’s embrace of human frailty was, in the late Robert Markus’s striking phrase, ‘a vindication of Christian mediocrity’. The cry of the Lord’s Prayer – Dimitte nobis debita nostra, ‘Forgive us our sins’ – was a persistent, penitential reminder of humanity’s need for divine forgiveness. A ...”

“... 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 ...”