“... experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations – Whitechapel, Notting Hill – have recovered, but the politics have evaporated like a puddle on hot ...”

“... security apparatus knew and approved of Khan’s doings. The former US ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Oakley, was reported in the New York Times as having said that General Mirza Aslam Beg, the Pakistani army chief of staff from 1988 to 1991, had told him of Pakistan’s nuclear ties with Iran, in return for which Iran would provide Pakistan with oil and ...”

“... that was it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I ...”

“... talks. Trimble knew he would have to accept Mitchell, but he played along with Paisley and Robert McCartney, the maverick integrationist Unionist, to use their objections to Mitchell as a bargaining chip when it came to the rules and procedures of the talks. When Mitchell took the chair – Godson describes well the hardline Unionists’ rage – a ...”

“... are not far to seek: his wife was the great-niece of the poet, and her mother, Mrs Humphry Ward of Robert Elsmere fame, had even composed a special free-thinkers’ marriage service for G.M. Trevelyan’s wedding. The late Victorian child was truly father to the Master of Trinity. Trevelyan was as strongly opposed to modernity, urban modernity, as any ...”

“... except as a version of what television has accustomed us to call ‘fictionalised documentary’. Robert Phelps was able to construct a perfectly coherent autobiography from Colette’s scattered reminiscences, and present The Earthly Paradise as if it were, not an imaginative parallel to her life, but the real thing. All Colette’s biographers, even ...”

“... and on the royal favourite Buckingham. There is only one article on a country other than England: Robert Harding’s ‘Aristocrats and Lawyers in French Provincial Government, 1559-1648’. William J. Bouwsma writes on ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture’. His most interesting point is that the words ‘anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ entered ...”

“... by Matthew Paris, the monk of St Albans. Any biographer is spoiled for choice among the sources: Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, Thomas Wykes of Osney, Alderman fitzThedmar of London – all of them salty and unrestrained in their comments, whether on the uselessness of Henry as a war leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the ...”

“... Sex and death mingle in ‘The Haystack in the Floods’ when Jehane is captured with her lover Robert. She sees a ‘long bright blade without a flaw/Glide out from Godmar’s sheath’ and cut Robert’s throat, who ‘moan’d as dogs do, being half dead’. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, one of the most prolific shaggers of ...”

“... sentiment has lent an animating spirit to several worthwhile works quite beyond the Song of Songs: Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe and Ron Hansen’s lavish and subtractive Mariette in Ecstasy and Anthony Oliveira’s recent Dayspring. You also just cannot say things like that at the breakfast table. ‘Christ is a sensuous being with a sensuous mother and a ...”

“... base except the archetypal white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established ...”

“... to a head in July 1967, when the ufologists uncovered a memo in which Condon’s right-hand man, Robert Low, argued that the study should be staffed ‘almost exclusively by non-believers’:although they couldn’t possibly prove a negative result, [they] could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the ...”

“... even where it presumably hurts them to do so; both the Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George and Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of Compact, spoke out against the suspension of Dean while objecting strongly to her views. But notably absent from the letter in support of Dean were the signatures of many prominent free-speech warriors, including ...”

“... trapped in copper tubes. Or the oracular brazen heads supposedly created by Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. These heads were forged from bronze or brass and activated with the help of arcane knowledge of spirits or celestial conjunctions. Once operational, they were able to predict the future and answer any question. But stories ...”

“... roll costs in the supermarket to how much it costs when bought in bulk: clear evidence of a scam. Robert Jenrick recently released a video of himself wandering around Stratford tube station confronting fare-dodgers (more scammers), which included a gnomic reference to streets full of ‘weird Turkish barbers’. In fact, this was a reference to another ...”