“... and out. The unions’ hold over the British workplace from the 1940s to the 1970s, the historian Robert Taylor concluded in 1994, was ‘always more illusory and less substantial than their many enemies liked to suggest’. The same goes for union militancy in general. The graph of working days lost annually in Britain to strikes and other labour disputes is ...”

“... breathe not his name!’ was the song by Thomas Moore, the name being that of the patriot Robert Emmet, executed after leading the 1803 rebellion, who asked that his epitaph remain unwritten until his country had taken its place among the nations of the earth. High speech and silence, this was the patriotic way, and no silence more urgent than that of ...”

“... her most interesting appearances are in the generous quotations from an unpublished journal by Robert Pinget, one of the few Beckett disciples to whom she took a liking. On 6 August 1960, he pays a visit to hand back to Sam the ms. [of Comment c’est] he’d given me three days before to read. I was dreading having to give my opinion. The text is so ...”

“... His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the county.) In ...”

“... of Eliot’s complete prose have been released; the first volume of a two-volume biography by Robert Crawford has appeared, greatly increasing our knowledge of Eliot’s life up until the publication of The Waste Land; and to these is now added this utterly authoritative edition of the text of the poems, which restores a missing line to ‘The Hollow ...”

“... feed – are in league with stolen, fleeting pleasures. Smith is the poet of ‘bold drops’. Robert Lowell was enthusiastic about her writing because it was ‘so unlike the usual poem trying so hard to be a poem’. In her essay ‘Simply Living’, she refers to ‘the pleasures of simplicity’ in order to make a fine distinction. ‘Enjoyment lurks ...”

“... but his poems were used during the war in which such witnessings acquired unprecedented authority. Robert Lowell’s remark that it was as if Housman had foreseen the Somme is one of the more complicated signposts in Housman country. His youngest brother, Herbert, was killed in action in 1901, and his nephew Clement Symons in Flanders in 1915. He wrote in 1933 ...”

“... suppose. One on each. Most were about Americans. A lot of presidents. Walt Disney, I remember him. Robert Oppenheimer. No, I’m joking. But Abraham Lincoln, at any rate. And when they died, no matter how, I always cried. But in a good way.’‘Because it wasn’t you!’‘No, no – it wasn’t that. It was more that they’d overcome all this injustice in ...”

“... a back seat. The first lengthy testimony in the book comes from two men on that committee, Robert Vázquez-Pacheco and Moisés Agosto-Rosario, and shows how much autonomy could exist within the organisation. Vázquez-Pacheco, a Black Puerto Rican born in New York City, made the transition from audience member at meetings to visibility in the simplest ...”

“... of exclusion by seeking to exclude his excluders in retaliation. Wanting, in the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller’s phrase, to ‘turn trauma into triumph’, the tragic hero tries to turn the tables. Being left out begins as tragedy, and tragedy, Freud suggests, is integral to development. So the developmental question – the moral question – is this: is ...”

“... Walsingham Priory in Norfolk (minus its famous shrine of Our Lady); his northern Protestant client Robert Ferrar advocated for his own Nostell Priory in Yorkshire as a new preaching centre and school. Abbot Sagar of Hailes Abbey imagined his house to have a future like Walsingham, as a college purged of its cult object of Christ’s blood. Among religious ...”

“... dining-room window as they leave his house after a lunch-party. ‘One life, one writing,’ as Robert Lowell was to say. Words must be as inconsequential as talk, which she could not have enough of, and yet as imperishable as stones. The anxiety present on every page is: would the paradox succeed? The reputation of Tom and Morgan is higher than her ...”

“... a remittance man was an agreeable kind of life. I had no qualms about being kept. When I showed Robert Graves, who still lives in Majorca, one of those early novels, he was encouraging enough to say that he found it interesting, but added: ‘Since you come from Nottingham, why don’t you write a novel about that?’ I had already written stories set ...”

“... are told) that the Tories were trying to destroy his life, and who attempted an assassination of Robert Peel, the word ‘paranoia’ was never used. Instead, and tellingly, M’Naghten was found insane on grounds of homicidal mania. This must be one of the most famous cases of conspiracy theory in the psychiatric and legal literature, and it is interesting ...”

“... the entire country. Based on research completed in August 1994 in 41 of the 145 Rwandan communes, Robert Gersony, a UNHCR consultant, estimated that ‘between 25,000 and 40,000 persons’ were killed during the first 100 days of RPF rule. The Gersony report – in fact just briefing notes – was leaked to the press. Under intense pressure from Kigali and ...”