“... 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 ...”

“... sounds very simple: put up shacks and hideaways in places so obvious that nobody will notice them. Robert Macfarlane, who lodged in a black hut assembled by urban explorers wearing orange hi-viz overalls during the fuss of the London Marathon, called his windowless shelter an ‘urban bothy’. The crew survey the territory as thoroughly as the developers with ...”

“... very smooth, haunting, overlaying melody which you hear. And that’s just what they did with Robert Fripp’s lead guitar. The third instalment in the Berlin triptych, Lodger, was in fact recorded in Switzerland in September 1978, though that wasn’t the reason it didn’t quite live up to the high expectations created for it by its predecessors. The ...”

“... their beautifully elaborated and uncomplicating meaning. The hammer of modern English metre, what Robert Graves called the smith-work of ti-tum, ti-tum, is going on during the deeper, longer oar-work of Old English, and the ear, no matter how ignorant it may be of the provenance of what it is hearing, picks up on the contest. This contest, perfectly ...”

“... Moorhouse’s book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It’s a campaign that would surely have changed the course of history and might even have deposed Henry VIII, though this was not the rebels’ aim. They ...”

“... Texans to be president (if only). In 1972 he supported McGovern (but died before the election). Robert Penn Warren, reviewing Patriotic Gore for Commentary, was surely right to say that what most moved Wilson was ‘some courageous manifestation of the old virtues’, regardless of political affiliation. Once when he was asked why he was so anti-British, he ...”

“... though, are a delight and I stand addressing the camera while caressing the 15th-century Sir Robert Waterton and his wife, Cecily. At my back is Lionel, Lord Welles with his bruiser’s face, pudding-basin haircut and elaborate armour, which did not save him from being cut down at Towton on Palm Sunday 1461. Unnoticed on previous visits is a sad little ...”

“... discovered the scandal was about to break. How had Macmillan allowed things to reach this point? Robert McNamara, the secretary of defence, was especially appalled, knowing what he did about the access Profumo had been granted. Davenport-Hines doesn’t acknowledge either that the Americans were at it themselves. A home-grown sex and spies scandal was ...”

“... asking, in a three-year-old field-wide Piercing persistence. ‘Oh yes’ I say ‘it cried.’ Robert Frost could not have handled such unimportant tragedy with greater sureness. In its way it seems to me more devastating than anything in Crow, unafraid of its feeling but not indulgent, the overwhelming sadness of the thing at once deepened and mitigated ...”

“... notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s urging. Almost certainly, after the Spanish Civil War, he seemed to ...”

“... to Perth are direct and immediate (new water) and the harms are diffuse and intergenerational,’ Robert Glennon wrote in National Geographic last year. ‘That’s what makes climate change such an intractable problem.’ There’s no immediate need for desalination in Britain. But ahead of the UK National Adaptation Programme that will be published later ...”

“... novel of all time. Significantly, what Europe produced in this middle market mode was principally Robert Graves’s I Claudius, the mental escape of a First World War veteran into antiquity, later fodder for a slack television serial. At a higher level, similar reflexes generated a cluster of historical novels by German exiles – the elder ...”

“... the biography was commissioned, is depicted as saintly, which perhaps he was. Another ex, Robert Tracy, who proved difficult to dislodge from Nureyev’s apartment in the Dakota Building and has some unwelcome things to say about Nureyev and safe sex, gets it gratuitously and vicariously in the teeth: ‘that shit-boy’, a quote that looks like ...”

“... with a grudge, melting into the crowd. There have been plenty of incidents – George Wallace or Robert Kennedy – like that. Taiwan is in its way a highly politicised society, in which partisan passions run deeper than in older and more jaded democracies, and the immediate effect of the magical missile has been to polarise public opinion more than ever ...”