“... concerns are so vast and so important that Richard’s exasperation and his preference for his young secretaries are almost forgivable. These women inherit, from their own intellectual formation, a busyness, a grappling with central issues, a determination to come to terms with the truth, however unpleasant this may be, and also a responsibility for their ...”

“... in particular, to the notion that the Labour Party was in secular decline. And now here were these young revisionist psephologists upsetting the whole neat theory and telling us that there was little if any statistical evidence to show that class was any less important as a source of voting behaviour. What has happened, they say, is not a withering away of ...”

“... Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their Labour masters wanted, and did it very well. Nationalisation apart (and few of them objected to the ...”

“... brought Harrison into contact with the Maitlands, the Darwins, the Cornfords, Gilbert Murray and Roger Fry. But, as Beard admits, Harrison’s work was always better known beyond the community of classicists. Her concern with origins – whether of human feelings or their enactment in cults and religions – was part of the zeitgeist. In the introduction to ...”

“... of 23 April 2015). Historians are equally prone to dismiss as royalist propaganda the report by Roger Coke, grandson of the author of the Petition of Right of 1628 (which affirmed constitutional protections against an overweening monarchy), that Cromwell once called it ‘the Petition of Shite’. I can believe that one, too.When Oliver first elbowed his ...”

“... a canonisation of him and a celebration of her own literary career. (‘Fanny’s last novel’, Roger Lonsdale called it in his biography of Charles Burney.) Yet she recovered and left to us a hoard of paper that makes Burney a biographer’s dream: the letters and journals that she lugged back and forth across the Channel, and which at present constitute ...”

“... in appreciation. He also did some delegation in order to complete the work. The life of Edward Young was written by Herbert Croft, who was more diligent than his master in unearthing facts, but whose pastiche of the Johnsonian style painfully illustrates how hard that style is to emulate. Even with these short cuts, and even with the assistance of the ...”

“... No one answered his knock, but the door was open, so he went in. A splendidly built young man, stripped to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not far from me. He was tall, handsome and serene, and was repelling with his boxing gloves a hectic assault of Ezra’s. After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus Pound ...”

“... partly owing to him, has, ever since his time, been both profound and unfortunate.Or this from Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2005):Although mathematical truths of various kinds had been surmised since ancient Egyptian and Babylonian times, it was not until the great Greek philosophers Thales of Miletus ...”

“... reign ended with his deposition less than a decade later, when a long-simmering conflict with Roger Mortimer spilled into open war. According to conventional accounts, he was captured by his enemies in the winter of 1326, shuffled around a bit while the nobility decided what to do with him, and then quietly murdered at Berkeley Castle in the late summer ...”

“... one month and I was not able to read the third. I also read some Eurocommunist writings, books by Roger Garaudy, Cohen’s biography of Bukharin and some copies of New Left Review. R.B.: Why do these questions of Soviet history loom so large in contemporary life? B.K.: In the West things happen very quickly. Before Thatcher or Reagan seems a long time ...”

“... fashioned a Faraday with unswerving theoretical conceptions of the world derived ultimately from Roger Joseph Boscovich, a Jesuit natural philosopher of the 18th century who had described the workings of nature not in terms of material atoms but of attractive and repulsive forces emanating from non-material centres. In an age of concern about the public ...”

“... him to prefer the quietest sort of ruin for the object of his affections’. The young lady, for her part, ‘saw through him, and had not the least intention of being seduced’. This is the kind of fun on the subject which Jane Austen had always enjoyed, and which probably cheered her last days. So far from the atmosphere of Sanditon being ...”

“... could have made her work vulnerable to disfavour. The handful of her poems recently printed in Roger Lonsdale’s 18th-Century Women Poets were very favourably received. In ‘Washing-Day’ the ‘domestic Muse’ abandons ‘Language of gods’ for gossip. In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Or ...”

“... whether for himself or itself is not always clear (at Béranger’s funeral, Baudelaire said to Roger de Beauvoir: ‘Make no mistake, I am in mourning for Les Fleurs du mal’). Perhaps only Baudelaire could have imagined coffins at the sound of logs being unloaded on a winter’s afternoon. He compared his heart to ‘chambres d’éternel deuil’ and ...”