“... news from England in the summer of 1832. We should not be beguiled by the calm portraits of Sir Robert Peel or his heavy, measured prose. He led his party through times much more violent than our own. During a time of tumultuous social change he fundamentally changed its direction. Historians rightly advise us against overdramatising particular events. But ...”

“... a strong conviction that they are showing us living things, and morally significant characters. Robert Walshe’s Wales’ Work is a novel about a practical joker which itself resembles an elaborate series of practical jokes, prodigally inventive, curiously inconsequential, and funny or not according to taste. Much of this first novel is set in a ...”

“... Ransford has diagnosed David Livingstone as a manic depressive, Dennis Rawlins has discredited Robert Peary’s claim to the North Pole, and William McKinlay has proved that Vihjalmur Stefansson was a selfish cad. Debunking probably was inevitable. These men were all of the heroic age of exploration that began in the mid-19th century and ended at the ...”

“... majestic Edwardian canvas by his son Winston, and once in a delicate line-drawing of the 1950s, by Robert Rhodes James. But all this time, as Roy Foster’s book makes plain, another Lord Randolph has lain concealed by the conventions of portraiture. Winston, to whom his father was a divinity but also a stranger, wanted to prove that Lord Randolph possessed ...”

“... status is, of course, more doubtful, even where a great composer is concerned. The Stravinsky/Robert Craft dialogues provide a case in point: can these unlikely confections, stilted essays in what one might call the comedy of conversational manners, really be taken seriously? In a sense, yes, they can. Their rhetoric – an arch, Nabokovian, dictionary ...”

“... and Romania, smuggling was an honoured and necessary trade. This is where Ludvik Hoch, or Robert Maxwell as he was later to rename himself, was born and brought up. Tax differences on the slaughter of animals and the sale of meat provided an opportunity for a lucrative and illegal trade in smuggled cattle. Beneath the full moon, both horses and ...”

“... Plot. Black was also much more generous to the dealings at the end of the reign between Sir Robert Cecil, Bishop Bancroft and a number of Catholic priests who attempted to solve their dilemma by a public affirmation of allegiance to the Crown in political matters. Meyer took these to be, if only symbolically, events of a similar kind of significance in ...”

“... of a town? Can you dedicate a book to a dot – two dots – on the map? The poet and academic Robert Crawford has a soft spot for nice spots and he dedicated his 1990 collection, A Scottish Assembly, ‘to Scotland’. Some countries and some cities – like some people – openly insist on being loved, and some of them behave as underdogs, which only ...”

“... of. In essence, what one deep throat told me was this ... Towards the end of December 1983, Sir Robert Armstrong, as Secretary of the Cabinet, set up an inquiry into leaks, relating, inter alia, to GCHQ Cheltenham and Belgrano matters. Various people were checked out, either known or unbeknown to themselves. In March 1984 there was a ‘tremendous ...”

“... by your kinship with Dante and Virgil. And don’t feel obliged to remind us just now What it was Robert Lowell appeared to be saying – You’d read him the poem you mean to read us – When the doors of the lift he was in and you weren’t Began closing. Just leave us the screams You could hear as the vehicle descended: Poor Cal. Up to then he’d been ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... of all nations, has bowed down lowest in his presence. The ‘24-carat taste buds’ belong to Robert Parker, a 57-year-old former Baltimore lawyer, who started the bimonthly subscription-only Wine Advocate in 1978, and whose many books on the world’s wines – Bordeaux, The Wines of the Rhône Valley and Provence (1987) and various editions of the ...”

“... from the extent of the opposition which it provoked: opposition so skilfully co-ordinated by Robert Harley, whose early commitment to the ‘Country’ philosophy, and whose subsequent adherence to its essence even when the pressures of power had obliged him to abandon much of its programme, are a thread of Brian Hill’s efficient if dour biography. Yet ...”

“... history of Westerns: Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin Land is redolent of New Deal optimism, Robert Warshow’s much anthologised essay ‘The Westerner’ is a précis of Cold War concerns, Leslie Fiedler’s Return of the Vanishing American rescripts the West in countercultural terms and Richard Slotkin’s vast Gunfighter Nation is haunted by ...”

“... of the shipwreck so briskly dealt with in the two recent biographies of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Robert Bernard Martin’s book, published last year, summarises the information in two competent pages. In Norman White’s Hopkins: A Literary Biography his comments on what happened, scattered passim through the relevant chapter, are even more ...”