“... A reviewer faced with 1,155 pages about Robert Maxwell is entitled to look at the pictures first. Joe Haines’s biography contains over eighty photographs of his hero, many in colour. Mostly they show him hobnobbing with crowned heads, presidents or prime ministers, with a pop star or a footballer thrown in. One picture, more puzzling than some, is captioned ‘Maxwell and team, about to leave Ulan Bator in the Mirror jet ...”

“... into a meeting-place which is fiercely lit and surrounded by shadows. When Colin and Mary meet Robert, he drily pumps them: Robert began to ask them questions and at first they answered reluctantly. They told him their names, that they were not married, that they did not live together, at least, not now. Mary gave the ...”

“... she condemns Lady Audley’s crimes, Braddon also hints, through the anti-feminist diatribes of Robert Audley, Sir Michael’s nephew, that women are frustrated and destructive because they are confined to passive domestic lives: If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of ...”

“... Of the initial meeting between Robert Katz, investigative hack and would-be screenwriter, and the late film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the former now records that the latter ‘seemed terribly annoyed’. To be honest, admits Katz, Fassbinder was in something of a bate throughout their brief acquaintance: his abiding image of the director is of someone ‘irascible, whining ...”

“... Logorrhoea:​ Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley were all afflicted with it. I only ever witnessed Duncan’s performances – free-form, extended, mostly improvised soliloquies. The one I remember best was at the poet Carl Rakosi’s house. It was many years ago, but I think he touched on Plato, Beethoven, Milton, Tom Thumb, Lysistrata, the genus Asterias (starfish) and the song ‘Penny Lane ...”

“... Robert Peters​ , né Parkins, wasn’t much to look at. He was ‘a little man with a stiff back who walked like a penguin’. Photographs show him as steeply balding, with a rice puddingy face that glooped onto his dog collar. He was tubby, and got tubbier. But something about him made a certain kind of woman sit up ...”

“... on a garment’ form the main interest of this erudite, entertaining and well-illustrated book. Robert Ward has made painstaking and profitable use of the vast mass of archival material in the Public Record Office (because of the Stuart kings’ involvement), the London Metropolitan Archives (which hold a vast amount of material from all the old water ...”

“... dark house in Wimpole Street one September morning; how she met health and happiness, freedom, and Robert Browning in the church round the corner.’ Lady Geraldine’s courtship had been drowned out by talk about Elizabeth’s. Aurora Leigh wasn’t faring any better. The first edition had sold out in a fortnight in 1856 and more than twenty reprints had come ...”

“... who attacked the Wilson administration’s infringement of neutrality during the Great War, or Robert Taft, who criticised the Nuremberg Trials as retroactive justice. In Brown’s book, there isn’t a page that anyone would find controversial or objectionable, unless there are places where Raoul Wallenberg and Nelson Mandela are despised. The treatment ...”

“... Marlowe filled the air at this time. Hints had appeared in print, in the loquacious pamphlets of Robert Greene and Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, but more damagingly precise were the reports of Government informers – a flourishing trade in the police-state atmosphere of late Elizabethan London. There are two key documents, generally referred to as the ...”

“... If Robert Lowell had not been a Lowell would he ever have had the confidence to write the poems he did? It is impossible to imagine the scion of a distinguished English family using that family now as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell ...”

“... but the author’s back to Hemingway as Hemingway seemed when we first read him in adolescence. Robert Coover is a marvellous craftsman, and sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, his two new books delight. Who would not enjoy, for example, this efficient, observant passage from the rendition of a Charlie Chaplin comedy in A Night at the Movies? The ...”

“... immortalised on the screen by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, mortalised by Dick Powell and Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in ...”

“... by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth. The historian Robert Dallek is neither; he decided to enter the field, as he explains in his introduction, in part because documents had become available that threw new light on several aspects of Kennedy’s life, and in part because he thought the old ones should be given a ...”

“... bloody good show, too. A lot of people weren’t Cold Warriors – and so much the worse for them.Robert Conquest, quoted by Jay Nordlinger in National Review, 9 December 2002There are rules​ for writing about the enemy in wartime. You must never forget that your side and his are at war, and that your side is right and his is wrong. Your writing must not ...”