“... and skills, chart the progress of disindustrialisation. Ian Jack’s Before the Oil Ran Out and Robert Chesshyre’s The Return of a Native Reporter are fine examples: picking over the debris of the factory system, they find their pathos in the spectacle of ghost towns. And then there is the literature on ‘sink’ housing-estates, which in contemporary ...”

“... the most unified of the slice books. It could well be read beside The Fatal Shore, complementing Robert Hughes’s information on convict life, extending the colonial landscapes, and importantly correcting Hughes’s simplistic view of the Aborigines.* When everything has been said about the ordeals of the convicts, their endurance and labour, and the ways ...”

“... adopted the test, and how soon after the discovery of HIV it was developed. On 23 April 1984 Robert Gallo announced that he had found the viral agent that caused Aids: by March 1985 a test was in place. It’s worth pointing out once again that the delays had nothing to do with the cultural meaning of blood and everything to do with pushes and pulls on ...”

“... A Vindication of Natural Society, appeared in May 1756. It was well received and its publisher Robert Dodsley offered 20 guineas for the copyright of the Philosophical Enquiry plus a further ten if it reached a third edition. The offer was accepted and the work was published in April 1757, six weeks after Burke married Nugent’s daughter Jane. He had also ...”

“... as Anatomy of the SS State, and Uwe Adam’s Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich. Michael Marrus’s and Robert Paxton’s study of Vichy France now fills one important gap, while Randolph Braham’s new two-volume work on The Holocaust in Hungary, massively detailed, covering every aspect of the subject, and based on a lifetime of erudition, represents the ...”

“... conceded to us goys. In concluding, I might mention an unnsual solution to the problem. This was Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an American story of a cross-country trip with philosophical interludes – one of the chief characters was named Phaedrus. Pirsig’s device was simple: he refrained, probably at a financial ...”

“... More than a century later, the belief is firmly expressed in The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk (1691), a Scots witness and believer, who says: ‘They are not of such stuff that they can come before God; they are far from Heaven, and safe from Hell.’ So the belief had hung on in Scotland, more than England. It is implied in some of the Border ...”

“... between public and private bodies occurs when Jim Garrison, still in shock from witnessing Robert Kennedy’s assassination on television, is finally able to make love to his at last sympathetic wife. The hyperactive perversity of the prostitutes in Jack Ruby’s night-club and the Sadean fantasies of Clay Shaw’s parlour are finally matched by the ...”

“... of the Russian Zone and so forbidden to Americans. She was trying to sell a suit that belonged to Robert Capa, who urgently needed the cash. Keller appeared in the crowd. ‘He was neither buying nor selling; he was risking disciplinary punishment, I am sure, to see the Russian soldiers ... Not knowing Russia, as none of us did, he believed or hoped, or ...”

“... Historians do not really belong to separate species and the best cultural historians, Schama, Robert Darnton, Natalie Davis, Greenblatt etc share much with Burckhardt, not least an exceptional talent for history, but the difference, in most cases, is more than one of narrative order. There is a satisfaction, a feeling of truth in the posing and solving of ...”

“... But alongside Sándor Petőfi, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Taras Shevchenko, Mihai Eminescu or Robert Burns, Shakespeare barely looks like a national poet at all, unlike Byron, as Dović and Helgason point out, whose engagement with liberal politics and eventual death in the cause of national liberation (even if it was the liberation of Greece rather than ...”

“... literary works to his own poetry and prose, from plays by Aeschylus and Shakespeare’ to works by Robert Louis Stevenson and Machado de Assis. Since 70 per cent of the Portuguese population was illiterate, this was always going to be a struggle. Pessoa paid little attention to costs and ‘his creditors were pounding on the door, almost from the day the Ibis ...”

“... reveres are mostly the fallen – Swift, Blake, Clare, Isaac Rosenberg, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Robert Desnos, Charles Péguy, Paul Celan, as well as people who are defined by their outsiderness, such as the young Berkeley and the mathematician Alan Turing – whose integrity is interwoven with their ruin. The poem is full of short studies of such ...”

“... and continuity, Manzoni shaped Birmingham as few other British cities have been shaped. Like Robert Moses in New York, he was without sentimentality or apparent social concern. The starkness and cheapness of Birmingham’s appearance today is owed to his relentless driving in of aggressive roads and driving down of architectural quality. Chamberlain’s ...”

“... to be, a collector of literary young men (‘These Gardners are the kind that hunt lions,’ Robert Frost, her next target, said). She was acting for her daughter in this matter. Months later, Brooke offered to have lunch with Mrs Gardner. Phyllis went too and was entranced, ‘carried along on a kind of irresistible current’. She knew nothing of his ...”