“... whom the term would have embraced at any later period, but one specific group – the followers of Robert Owen. Like Engels himself, Robert Owen was an unusual figure among the founding fathers of socialism in that he was also a successful capitalist entrepreneur. Born in 1771, the son of a humble Welsh saddler, Owen soared ...”

“... Putting on again joyously the hateful harness’. That is how Robert Pinget’s diffident and slightly dotty narrator, Monsieur Songe, describes the process of taking up his pen yet again, and adding one more to an already considerable cavalcade of novels.* Then he crosses out the word ‘hateful’. And then he crosses out the word ‘harness ...”

“... If Robert Lowell had not been a Lowell would he ever have had the confidence to write the poems he did? It is impossible to imagine the scion of a distinguished English family using that family now as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell ...”

“... of Scotland’s rulers, led an army of unusual size and quality into northern England. The young Henry VIII had embarked on a military expedition in northern France, and Scotland responded to French calls for aid by invading England. James IV’s army was equipped with an impressive number of modern cannon cast in bronze and was accompanied by ...”

“... fans were once legion, and as reverential as mystics or poets. Indeed many were poets, like Robert Bridges, who sang that she had ‘all passion’s splendour’. Writers of all sorts revered her, from the anonymous Late Victorian critic who enthused over the structure of Wuthering Heights to the novelist L.P. Hartley, who doted on her whole oeuvre and ...”

“... no British novels that, like Catch 22, approach war as lunacy made real, or implicitly ask, like Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, why running dope is worse than killing unarmed Vietnamese. Such a mixture of the macabre and the grotesque with a touch of anarchy is not a British vein. There are extraordinary figures in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour ...”

“... nibbled at by the sharp tooth of development. But it still just about holds. In Sprawl, Robert Bruegmann bids those of us who cherish the division between city and countryside to take stock and review our values. Everywhere, the arbitrary containment of communities is dead or dying, he argues. Where it is maintained, it is only at a cost and by a ...”

“... Robert Stone​ was the feral child of American literature. He arrived in the world with no one to explain or defend him, except his mother, Gladys. About her we know only stray bits of personal history. The chief evidence that Stone’s father existed is the fact of Stone himself. All other claims – that he was a railroad detective, was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next ...”

“... of Unionist voters as part of that overall vote. There is also an article by the No-campaigner Robert McCartney, a barrister and UK Unionist MP whom no one in Britain I know has ever heard of. Perhaps that’s because he’s kept the press on their guard with his proven readiness to sue for libel (there was a famous episode in Northern Ireland some years ...”

“... helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way down, Robert Lowells (d. 1977, with the Collected Poems coming next year) are a good buy; stock in Anthony Burgess (d. 1993) should probably be held for a year or two; Borgeses (d. 1986) will surge once the editing and republishing are sorted out; James Merrills ...”

“... border zone between journalism and serious human ethology. These authors include Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris and E.O. Wilson. The present work is dedicated to the memory of Robert Ardrey, so the reader should know what to expect. The radical difference between social anthropology and the kind of thing ...”

“... Press. During my visit I am informed that this first-ever biography of Kadar was inspired by Robert Maxwell during a visit to Budapest. People talk about Mr Kadar with an affection that surprises me. ‘He says in public what he says in private,’ says an editor I meet at a party, who considers that as rare a trait among politicians as I do. On the day ...”

“... Before that, his pleasure in the beauty of nature darkens when he remembers how other poets, young and strong, were reduced to wretchedness while still in their prime: I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of Him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountain-side ...”

“... in the first place. It is one of the few questions not addressed by Barker’s acolyte and devotee Robert Fraser in this over-long, over-respectful first biography. Fraser starts from the premise that Barker is self-evidently a major writer: ‘George Barker was a poet of outstanding gifts, an enchanter of souls, a verbal magician with a pot of gold beneath ...”

“... feeling pessimistic about the outlook for the case. Even the fact that during her early years the young woman in question was becoming fluent in three languages besides her own, and reading assiduously and learning to write letters in an exquisite italic hand, scarcely counterbalances the accumulation of woes, or suggests that the sufferer might go on to ...”