“... The impression is rather like that which James himself registered after reading a selection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions … one smells the thing unprinted.’ James clearly matters to Tóibín more than any other novelist does, and The Master is probably his most self-scrutinising work. But you can see how ...”

“... came back home. You can count the exceptions on the fingers of one hand: Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, one or two others. Iraq’s social infrastructure still isn’t working, years after the occupation ended; it’s been wrecked. The country has been demodernised. The West has destroyed Iraq’s education services and medical services; it handed over ...”

“... an actor’s own, that one feels with Cagney and Bogart and Stanwyck; let alone, as with Robert Mitchum, a dangerous allure, or, as with Gloria Grahame, an unbetrayable charm that makes her stand out in any crowd. Yet between 1938 and 1962, he played comic and serious parts with a versatility, a variety of lights and shades that puts him easily in ...”

“... when he was haranguing a brawling mob, with a few girlfriends in fur coats rushing for the exit. Robert Skidelsky, in his 1975 biography, attempted to mitigate Mosley’s culpability by arguing that the violence was ‘at least as much the result of Anti-Fascist demonstrators interrupting meetings or attacking Fascists’. In the original edition, Skidelsky ...”

“... look anywhere else. This was partly because of his quite deliberate scene-stealing manoeuvres. Robert Alda, the father of Alan, acted with Lorre in a horror film which has since become a cult called The Beast with Five Fingers. You ‘had to be prepared’ for his ‘little tricks’ all the time, Alda claimed. When other actors had turned away, you could ...”

“... the kind of detail which was to become commonplace in the war memoirs of Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves, but which would not have been consistent with Conrad’s method, or James’s. Morton’s overwhelming fear, as he crawls towards the enemy trenches, is that he will put his hand into ‘something nasty’, like a dead German. Hardy ...”

“... necessary for her to come into France . . . to raise the siege of Orléans . . . and to go to Robert de Beaudricourt in the town of Vaucouleurs, the captain of that place, that he would give her people to go with her.’ DeVries assigns priority to Joan’s experience of the ‘voice’, and suggests that ‘Burgundian troops’ burned the church at ...”

“... lending, or borrowing as the case might be. When The Closing of the American Mind first came out, Robert Paul Wolff, then a professor of philosophy at Amherst, wrote a short review in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. Let me quote from his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned ...”

“... In the autumn of 1358, another ‘Great Company’ of English and Breton routiers under Robert Knolles invaded the rich Loire provinces, moving on into the Nivernais and the Auxerrois. ‘They brought the whole of the region under their control, ordering every village great or small to ransom itself and buy back the bodies, goods and stores of every ...”

“... at first, Jesenskà quickly responds to him, as nearly everyone does. A Hungarian doctor, Robert Klopstock, whom Kafka meets at a sanatorium, is similarly enamoured, and he seems to move to Prague mostly to be nearer to Kafka, who then disappoints him with his reclusiveness. Kafka seems unable to refrain from inciting affection, which he then finds ...”

“... affairs. Kennan was glad to do so and invited several outsiders, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Robert Oppenheimer, to join him. They concluded that a sovereignty strong enough to calm French fears about Germany and resist what they took to be the threat of Soviet expansion would have to include the British and that the British, to maintain what they could ...”

“... entire lives, not just in the working day. An alternative was proposed by office designers such as Robert Propst at Herman Miller, who were still working on behalf of the corporations, but who saw Taylorism as deadening the creative forces that were beginning to be seen as useful to business, perhaps as a result of the rise of advertising. Open plan became the ...”

“... some perplexity’. A short time later Eliot and Mansfield met at a dinner party in Hammersmith (Robert Graves was also present) where, she wrote, Eliot ‘grew paler and paler and more and more silent’ while their host (whom she likened to a butcher) ‘cut up, trimmed and smacked into shape the whole of America and the Americans’. The two, he without ...”

“... galvanising and transformative writers, to remain the Scotland Yeats had declared the ‘fruit of Robert Burns and Scott’ – ‘not a nation’ at all, but merely ‘a province with a sense of the picturesque’? I thought about that challenge when I attended a performance in Lochcarron by the Gaelic band Daimh. Their piper and singer, Calum Alex ...”

“... the Fieldings had known. The foundation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, organised by Sir Robert Peel, led a decade later to the disbandment of the runners, not so much because there was nothing for them to do, but because, when the magistrates lost their executive powers, the runners didn’t fit into the newly reorganised system of criminal ...”