“... fighting to the last bullet to defend Hitler in his bunker, could emerge as best choice for the Robert Schuman Prize for services to European unity.* Why should European justice too not let bygones be bygones? More generally, appointments to the court had little or nothing to do with juridical qualifications. Nearly all were political. The Belgian judge was ...”

“... the multitude.’ What’s more, Joyce might stand for the obscuring of story, the triumph of Robert Browning’s oblique ‘truth broken into pragmatic hues’ over the direct address achieved, he said, by his wife: ‘You speak out, you ...’ ‘The novelist had metamorphosed himself into an Artist, and described himself proudly as such. His novels ...”

“... history, and its politics are not what you might expect. Last time I was in Colombia I carried Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics: a great help in listing questions about this old and battered democracy, if democracy is what the answers to his questions prove it to be.* ‘Old’? Competitive elections have been held in Colombia, on and off, at ...”

“... heroes. More relevant by far would be a comparison with Lukács’s contemporaries, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach and Arnoldo Momigliano, who did more for the survival of the values to which he paid lip-service than it was in his intention or in his power to do. There is no mention of these names in the present biography, which is just as ...”

“... the spark. And there is a new roll of honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the ...”

“... very different line, and in their chapter on the general law of medical negligence John Finch and Robert Cowley (respectively an academic and a practising lawyer) commend them for doing so. The Canadian Supreme Court has pointed out that what is a reasonable risk to a doctor is not always so to the patient, and that to allow medical judgment alone to ...”

“... ventures of Ben Jonson – Hot Anger Soon Cooled, written with Thomas Dekker and Henry Porter, and Robert II, with Henry Chettle – now just bodiless titles in an old theatrical ledger. The case of Marlowe is, as always, more ambiguous. In some senses we can be grateful. Seven of his plays remain, and there is no real evidence that any whole works have been ...”

“... worth, less easy to make than it was. So one can argue that Hockney should not have been hurt by Robert Hughes’s description of him as ‘the Cole Porter of modern art’. He has been true to his talent, which is great, and avoided boredom for himself and his audience by turning to photography, computer graphics or Picasso when a line of development did ...”

“... a more generous view of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), or indeed Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, might have yielded a more abundant answer. On the other hand, Freud’s warm if critical admiration of England (which, he shared, incidentally, with members of the Viennese Jockey Club), his remarkable command of ...”

“... Philosophes was being pushed off the booksellers’ shelves by such robustly patriotic novels as Robert-Martin Lesuire’s Les Sauvages de l’Europe (1760), in which a young French couple travel to England, the land of advanced philosophy, only to hurry back home after near-fatal experiences with English riots, prisons, highway robberies and insane ...”

“... of the biographical archive (notably David Thomas’s Shakespeare in the Public Records, 1985, and Robert Bearman’s Shakespeare in the Stratford Records, 1994) but by the work of Peter Thomson and Andrew Gurr on the fortunes of Elizabethan acting companies, or of Douglas Bruster on Troilus and Cressida and the language of Jacobean economics, or of ...”

“... for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and no ...”

“... in war movies.) Other readers will think (appropriately, too) of moralised adventure novels, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s; of comics, with their arrangements of panels and captions; and of photography. Freddy begins the poem by showing us snapshots, tokens of the domestic life he spends most of the poem longing for: That was sausage day on our farm outside ...”

“... records or laying plans to snuff her out. Prominent among these writers are Milo Speriglio and Robert Slatzer (a bit of a cross-category-turn this last one: he claims to have been married to Monroe for three days). There is a new addition to this group, a hysterical book by Donald H. Wolfe which may just prove to be the conspiracy sub-genre’s reductio ad ...”

“... who is described as having to resign on account of ‘his lickerish itch for downy youths’; or Robert Williams Buchanan, who is economically characterised as ‘Scottish poet, novelist, journalist, sneak, and liar’; or, magisterially: ‘Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-69), a nasty, little, ugly, malicious, sexually ...”