“... 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 ...”

“... Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he really means is ...”

“... of history to a vassal of economics. The two most famous works in this genre were both written by Robert Fogel, who was thus established as midwife and guru, entrepreneur and high priest, of this new cult. The first, Railroads and American Economic Growth, was an audaciously-conceived study which cut the iron horse so emphatically down to size, by exploring a ...”

“... Gascon, Poulidor le Limousin, Georges Meunier le Pêcheur de Vierzon, and the hope for the future, Robert Alban, is Bamban le Caladois. Regional races, such as Paris-Roubaix, the Tour de I’Ouest or the Tour de I’Avenir, give great scope for local reputations to be displayed and sustained. Dr Holt is right to see the Tour de France, and perhaps cycling in ...”

“... informed and highly readable on Tennyson’s modern standing; on the strengths and limitations of Robert Frost; and on critics (Yvor Winters especially, but also Eliot and Richards) whose quirks he sets off against their more authoritative judgments. Here he writes with an assurance that values are relative but arguable, that criticism, as he puts ...”

“... became a highly-paid lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly ...”

“... Szakall.Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic small talk (‘How’s the ...”

“... the mimicry notably a defence. There is also a curious deadness about the letters to his friend Robert Buckingham. One senses something dreadful happening, but the very superficiality of the later letters makes it hard to identify: is Forster drifting away from a world on which he has no purchase, or is he being suffocated? The ‘public Forster’ of the ...”

“... Impartial Enquiry into the Conduct of Viscount Townshend’) and of Walpole (The Conduct of Robert Walpole Esq’), both published in 1717. The fact would be puzzling, for they were bitter opponents of Harley, whose cause Defoe seems to have spent much energy in championing: indeed Walpole was Harley’s chief accuser and persecutor. This prompts Sill ...”

“... regaining ‘the right to manage’. In writing The Enemies Within MacGregor has been assisted by Robert Tyler, late of the tabloid press, but my guess is that the strange mixture of Zane Grey Western and Harvard Business School management-speak which MacGregor’s ghost employs in place of English prose accurately reflects his employer’s mode of ...”

“... Land art, Performance art, Living sculpture, Body art and Community art. Kramer is unimpressed by Robert Smithson’s ‘ambition ... to break with the conventions of studio production and museum exhibitions in order to create an art that would stand in a more intimate and vital relationship to the world of nature and to the man-made social ...”