“... miles southwest of Exeter the A38 rips along the edge of the churchyard of Dean Prior, where Robert Herrick, with one period of interruption, was rector between 1630 and his death in 1674. The interruption began in or around January 1646, when the New Model Army marched along the predecessor of the A38 to relieve Plymouth. On their way they seem to have ...”

“... as they abandon its humanistic apparatus of dedicatory epistles and pointed marginalia. This may give the book a kind of accessibility but it obscures the work’s origins in a movement that was as serious about its wit as it was in its scholarship. The new Cambridge edition is an elegant reminder of its Latinity, its humanism and its seriousness. ...”

“... Madox Ford’ and William Carlos Williams’s ‘To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven’. And you may say that his luck holds: for Robert Green is also an admirer, but his book is thoroughly sensible, unbedazzled and discriminating, the book of someone who has heard of other writers and is in no kind of ‘Special ...”

“... done, the author explains lucidly and in considerable detail the operation of what to modern eyes may seem an essentially unacceptable system. Since the 19th century ushered in a new concept of public morality, many historians have found little to praise in the bribery and corruption of the Jacobean Court. And amongst the system’s beneficiaries few cut a ...”

“... Ransford has diagnosed David Livingstone as a manic depressive, Dennis Rawlins has discredited Robert Peary’s claim to the North Pole, and William McKinlay has proved that Vihjalmur Stefansson was a selfish cad. Debunking probably was inevitable. These men were all of the heroic age of exploration that began in the mid-19th century and ended at the ...”

“... majestic Edwardian canvas by his son Winston, and once in a delicate line-drawing of the 1950s, by Robert Rhodes James. But all this time, as Roy Foster’s book makes plain, another Lord Randolph has lain concealed by the conventions of portraiture. Winston, to whom his father was a divinity but also a stranger, wanted to prove that Lord Randolph possessed ...”

“... Plot. Black was also much more generous to the dealings at the end of the reign between Sir Robert Cecil, Bishop Bancroft and a number of Catholic priests who attempted to solve their dilemma by a public affirmation of allegiance to the Crown in political matters. Meyer took these to be, if only symbolically, events of a similar kind of significance in ...”

“... to horizon-occluding features. The observatory has been long in the making – a website says it may be open to the public next year; photographs suggest that, like Walter De Maria’s lightning field in New Mexico and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, it will become one of those places of pilgrimage, which for one ...”

“... refuted the conclusion of the argument from design, without challenging its premises. Nature may be well designed, much as Darwin’s creationist predecessors thought, but good design doesn’t require a designer. Thus John Maynard Smith once defined biological adaptations as the sorts of trait that natural theologians would have mistaken as evidence for ...”

“... stayed in an apartment overlooking the beach. ‘It is such a wonderful apartment,’ she wrote to Robert Lowell in 1958, that we’ll never rent it again, no matter what heights rents soar to, I think. Top floor, 11th, a terrace around two sides, overlooking all that famous bay and beach. Ships go by all the time, like targets in a shooting gallery, people ...”

“... the process of myth-making, and the psychological and literary needs that process served. Though Robert Browning especially would have resisted the idea, the Brownings’ courtship seems ideally suited to our current preoccupation with the priority of language over experience. These were lovers who read long before they saw one another, who admired writing ...”

“... people living there at the turn of the last century: Richard Roberts, his wife Anne, their sons Robert, Richard E(llis) and Arthur, their daughter Margaret, and three servants – the cook, Sarah Reece, and two teenage housemaids, Emily Lunmir and Ethel Bailey. The eldest son, William, must have already moved out. In his will, my great-great-grandfather ...”

“... which David Thomson’s mother belonged, was very grand and patriarchal. The patriarch, ‘Uncle Robert’, was Viscount Finlay of Nairn who had been a Liberal MP with Gladstone, Lord Chancellor under Lloyd George and, in his eighties, a judge of the International Court at the Hague. Twenty or thirty people, servants or relations, stood in the dining-room ...”

“... but of symbolic logic). Such an acquiescence in classical models is scarcely surprising since, as Robert Skidelsky clearly demonstrates, there was virtually nothing in the world before 1914 to suggest to an academic liberal of Keynes’s background that the classical economic system had failed or broken down. Keynes’s economics before 1914 were therefore ...”

“... to do with Pindar. Elsewhere, when a certain grossness is needed, the chance is missed. Both Sir Robert Stapylton (1647) and Henry Fielding (1743) have a go at translating Juvenal’s ferocious account of the profligate Empress Messalina working as a prostitute in a Roman brothel and both suppress Juvenal’s reference to gilded nipples (‘papillis ...”