“... only other living French novelist I would compare with her as a source of intelligent pleasure, Robert Pinget.) She went about literature slowly once she had taken to it. Tropisms, her first book, was not published until 1939, seven years after she began writing it. It is a sparse but mordant collection of short scenes of social exchange whose ordinariness ...”

“... in Michael Collins. None matters much to me nor, it seems, have any mattered to the Irish public. Robert Kee put it well when he wrote that the film’s intentions were honest and its central themes ‘historically wholly acceptable’. Not for the first time, however, Kee is in a minority position. The film’s historical compression has been transformed by ...”

“... number of Hogg’s other novels and stories, including the most famous of all. The first victim of Robert Wringhim the justified sinner, and his diabolical shadow Gil-Martin, is a minister who sits up when shot; and when Wringhim’s own body comes to be buried, it has stiffened into a sitting posture, so that one of the burial party, in a passage expunged in ...”

“... to Gillian Weir, in the tone of voice in which a gourmet deplores the popularity of hamburgers. Robert Sherlaw Johnson’s essay discusses the gradual development of bird-song in the music, from its recognisable but unambitious beginnings in the Quatuor to its final explosion in the sermon to the birds in Saint François. He shows how Messiaen fitted the ...”

“... of a very interesting set of lectures: on cosmology, on TV, on the law, and above all on suicide. Robert Stoller suggested that the question the psychiatrist should ask of the trans-sexual is not, ‘Why you?’ but: ‘Why not me?’ Night Train is so accurately disturbing that it makes one ask the same question about suicide. And yet the most remarkable ...”

“... of sand. John MacLean, in whose kitchen-room bannocks cooking on the fire had been photographed by Robert Adam in 1905; his three children, Catherine, Mary and Allan, barefoot outside the little window; Donald MacKinnon, who made eight spinning-wheels out of oak driftwood in 1859: they lived here, between the silverweed pasture and the sea-strand of ground ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the travails of his final weeks. Ostwald’s is the first study that tries not ...”

“... 1985. At this point the novel received a huge boost. An Aryan Nation group under the leadership of Robert (‘Bob’) Jay Matthews embarked on a series of terrorist actions against what they called ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government, culminating, in June 1984, in the assassination of the Denver talk-show host, Alan Berg (‘a pushy Jew’). Matthews had ...”

“... which alters once and for all the common perception of an area in the field. One such case was Robert Rosenblum’s essay, ‘The Abstract Sublime’, published in 1961. Its conclusion was that, ‘in its heroic search for a private myth to embody the sublime power of the supernatural, the art of Still, Rothko, Pollock and Newman should remind us that the ...”

“... the Treasury after New Labour’s victory. Robinson’s fortune had been inflated by dealings with Robert Maxwell, the Channel Island tax havens and a legacy from a satirically named Madame Bourgeois, a Belgian heiress. He had no political base in the Commons and may have felt it politic to bankroll Blair’s closest ally. Mandelson did not declare his ...”

“... LaRouche, the real ‘existentialist’ honchos on the boardwalk aren’t Adorno or Arendt, but Robert McNamara and the Kilgorean figure of William Westmoreland. This volume bears little sign of the bourgeois deviationism to which Marcuse fell prey in the Forties, though it may be coming in one of the promised sequels. These were, after all, the years when ...”

“... for Europe. For a while they lived in Deyá, Mallorca, where Mathews came under the influence of Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess lurks behind some of the arcane mystic lore that turns up in the plot of his first novel, The Conversions (1962). A much greater influence on his early fiction, however, was Raymond Roussel, to whose work he was introduced ...”

“... handles polarities of ideology and thought – between appalling racists, such as Carlyle and Robert Knox, and enlightened liberals, such as Mill and James Mursell Phillippo – but also manages to connect these bodies of thought to the changing circumstances of location, climate, daily life and general social history. Partly because the reader has been ...”

“... the camera), and because it showed to the full Karel Reisz’s sympathy for people who, in Robert Musil’s words, go out on an adventure and lose their way. This was a key element in all his films, whether they were set in Nottingham, London or Las Vegas. I think especially of the confused and manic Morgan in the film of that name, and of the driven ...”