“... with which Othello closes: Soft you; a word or two before you go. I have done the state some service, and they know it.’ The intentions were important for Lewis, and no doubt he saw himself as a bit of an Othello. Iago’s ‘I am not what I am’ (‘The small and shoddy, when it meets its kind, knows it at once by this sign’) he contrasts with ...”

“... of an easy story. But it was Frazer who found his way onto the pages of the popular press. Why? Robert Fraser (no relation, different spelling) has not set out directly to answer that question, but his book does serve to highlight the problems of Frazer’s success. The Making of ‘The Golden Bough’, published to coincide with the centenary of the ...”

“... man who refused to pay his fare filled the bus with laughter when he told the conductor: ‘Secret Service.’ Revolucion was soon in conflict with the ‘pro-Soviet comandantes’, with the disciplinarian elements in the revolution’s leadership, with the police power which arose – as it had in Russia – out of the mass executions of the old regime’s ...”

“... can ... make me quite forget my troubles; if only I had sought solace for my unhappiness by taking service with Her Majesty much earlier.’ Even so, this is recognisably the world of Genji, attractive yet enigmatic in its perhaps over-refined aestheticism, and recognisably, if one dare judge through the hazards of translation, the work of Murasaki. The ...”

“... incident occurs. Here we are close to the art of the stage conjurer: a point well made by Robert Barnard in his concise and extremely acute book. Again, over this long period of time the clue tends steadily to refine and even attenuate itself in consonance with the enhanced acuity of readers. It is no longer at all likely to be the imprint of a boot ...”

“... Winstanley and Harrington, but I found his chapters on lesser writers even more instructive. Robert Burton and Samuel Gott are revealed as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised. Dr Davis is also interesting on William Sprigge’s A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth of 1659, the anonymous Chaos (1659) and The Free State of Noland ...”

“... of the flesh secures him employment as a peripatetic stud on the books of an agency called Self Service. The agency is run by a butch lady called Victoria Self, who wears hausfrau braids and a blue serge suit, and who hints at painful punishments awaiting those who infringe the rules of her exotic craft. This is one apparent strand in the plot. Another is ...”

“... by two refugee physicists in Birmingham, the German-born Rudolf Peierls and the Austrian-born Otto Robert Frisch, when they found that the critical mass of the fissile uranium isotope 235 needed for an explosion was no more than a few kilograms. In the summer of 1941 Peierls engaged Fuchs to help him with theoretical work on the project. Nine years later Fuchs ...”

“... disarray of entities, interests and occasions’. Some of these mechanisms no longer applied, and Robert Harley, the brilliant minister who investigated the Memorial, may have been bluffing when he wrote in 1702 that there remained ‘sufficient authoritys given by the Laws in being for suppressing’ seditious print. But new patches were being stitched onto ...”

“... of classical and medieval Latin poetry and, not least, the Christian concept of love as sacrifice, service and boundless longing. But the troubadours did not merely theorise love: they and their jongleurs performed their exquisitely crafted lyrics in the courts and towns of France, Italy, Spain and eventually all Europe. Regrettably, no more than 10 per cent ...”

“... provided was left with unappealing options: she could live with her family or she could enter service, offering her master and mistress obedience in exchange for bed, board and paltry wages. While suitable enough for girls, being a maidservant must have been galling for older women. Being single was thought suspicious: take Margery Noble, who entered the ...”

“... but for Macmillan’s generation the fact that the entire Labour front bench had avoided active service was something to be taken into account. ‘Poor Mr Gaitskell,’ Macmillan wrote in his diary after Armistice Day in 1960, ‘always seems a little conscious on these occasions that he has no medals. However, he supported the war, from Dr Dalton’s ...”

“... Northern counterparts, if not as the forebears of a European modernity that was still in embryo as Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox. More troublingly, the compatibility of slavery with these ‘conjectures of order’ raises questions about the integrity both of American history and of the modern world that O’Brien’s Southerners imperfectly ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... grunt Tim O’Brien, face the darkness squarely. The third, former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, merely pretends to. In his own way, however, each writer tells the story of a quest or a flight, a search for redemption and understanding, a search for the truth, or an escape from it. Each, in his own way, is likewise a cipher for the American ...”