“... we believe the words enough? Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth? When Robert Louis Stevenson died his business-minded Scottish nanny quietly began selling locks of the infant’s hair which she claimed to have cut forty years earlier. The believers, the seekers, the pursuers bought enough hair to stuff a sofa. The house of Croisset ...”

“... short-suffering Mosley with his other help-meet Diana Guinness née Mitford. Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky avers that ‘Mosley always tried to maintain the old English distinction between private life and public life.’ But Mosley came up against that other, even more powerful, old English tradition or law which has recently snuffed out ...”

“... American films of the Forties, such as Body and Soul (1947), written by Polonsky and directed by Robert Rossen, or Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), exposed the corrosive effects of a culture devoted to money. The most overtly pro-Soviet films produced in Hollywood, Mission to Moscow (1943), written by Howard Koch, and Song of Russia (1944), written by ...”

“... armed clashes, allowing uniformed and armed Albanians to set up checkpoints. Once the US envoy Robert Gelbard had issued a statement that me KLA could be treated as a terrorist organisation, Milosevic had die perfect excuse for a crackdown: in March, he moved into Drenica with tanks and heavy artillery against unarmed civilians. After Drenica everything ...”

“... neurophysiology carried out in the Sixties. It was then that Hobson and his long-time collaborator Robert McCarley decided to pursue their interest in the regulation of sleep and dreaming by intensively studying neurons located in the brainstem, the phylogenetically-older brain structure which sits at the base of our hypertrophied cerebral hemispheres. Ideally ...”

“... His birth certificate, which Mantle hasn’t bothered to examine, shows that his father, William Robert Archer, lived at 48 Highbury Grove, then a North London boarding-house owed by one Mrs Rhoda Bowness. His occupation is given as ‘journalist’. The mother, Lola Howard Archer, lived separately over the Thames at a now-vanished address in Southwark ...”

“... source of metaphors in transactions between the sexes, also touched on in a new book by Robert Erickson) in their exercises or boasts of sexual tyranny, in ways which sometimes go beyond the idiomatic or poetic commonplace and acquire an air of formal ideologising.† Richardson was driven by a restless over-explicitness which sometimes builds into ...”

“... in 1935: ‘My heart always warms to people who do not come to see me, especially Americans.’ To Robert Bridges there is a judicious criticism of Hopkins (sprung rhythm is not difficult to write well, but Hopkins writes it badly) and he thanks Witter Bynner for admiring ‘my poems even more than I admire them myself’. The show-off element is strong, and ...”

“... being drawn into Kim Novak in Vertigo is a model of the way we are sucked into films. Charming Robert Walker and boring Farley Granger make a trap for our need to identify. The method of Rear Window – a voyeur in the dark inspecting other lives – is the principle of cinematic spectacle. Hitchcock’s best films all grow out of his instinctive ...”

“... with Christopher Hill, the Balliol historian. When Dell’s Committee began its work it picked Robert Neild at Cambridge as its adviser but Balogh, who was worried that ‘the fucking shits will get away with it,’ got his Balliol colleague, Andrew Graham, to brief Neild. The Committee’s report was a landmark. It angrily pointed out that ‘the first ...”

“... so forth – and Geertz quickly became embroiled in a bitter losing battle to recruit his friend Robert Bellah, a sociologist of religion, which erupted into the gleefully malicious pages of several national newspapers. (Geertz quotes a ‘particularly enragé mathematician’ telling the director Carl Kaysen that ‘social science will be your ...”

“... of spill. Sunset. Departure ‘in teeth of surmised streamers’. ‘The weasel,’ according to Robert Graves, ‘a favourite disguise of Thessalian witches ... called cedro, usually translated “the artful one”.’ Prynne’s art is in the sanguine play of breath, the repetitions: ‘she, she, she, and only she’. All he requires of us is an ...”

“... low at the time because the Mirror was doing rather well. It had no proprietor. A year earlier, Robert Maxwell, who, with Mrs Thatcher’s encouragement, had been allowed to buy the Mirror in spite of the findings of a government report 13 years previously that he was unfit to run a public company, had gone overboard once too often and drowned. Trade unions ...”

“... in The Citizen Kane Book), which argues the case for Mankiewicz’s authorship, but on Robert Carringer’s The Making of Citizen Kane (1984), which takes the question of collaboration further still and stresses the decisive influence of financial, legal and other contingencies. When told the thesis of Carringer’s book, Welles responded ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”