“... When Robert Graves left Charterhouse School in 1914, the headmaster wrote in his report: ‘Well, goodbye, Graves and remember that your best friend is the wastepaper basket.’ (Charterhouse is the public school that was recently reported to be replacing its tuckshop with a branch of Starbucks, but in fact isn’t ...”

“... at the suggestion of the ICA’ – where she is writer in residence – ‘I invited five bright, young writers with a healthy clutch of novels between them, all more or less friends of mine, to write stories of a pornographic nature for which they would receive £250 each.’ Direct, conversational, ‘honest’, and then there’s that studied mention of ...”

“... Carp (Prion, £8.99), but he is acknowledged on the title page, and his potted biography is in Robert Robinson’s introduction. Carp, unlike his author, has no pretensions to modesty: It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography, to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when ...”

“... however, outstanding: on the landowner and painter Dick Wyndham and the connoisseur-collector Sir Robert Abdy. Wyndham, a man who found relief from his various tensions in the variety and depths of his friendships, comes over well and his qualities are beautifully portrayed here, especially when so well placed against a sketch of his enemy Wyndham Lewis (who ...”

“... Donoughue from first page to last is anxious to impress us with the qualities of his colleagues. Robert Armstrong (yes, Robert Armstrong) was ‘warm, complex, sensitive – a marvellous team member’. Robin Butler was ‘the most outstanding civil servant with whom I ever had to deal’ (and, some ninety pages ...”

“... Most of these are now in libraries in Texas. As early as 1934, Beasley’s original publisher, Robert McAlmon, was complaining that a rare book dealer was asking $40 for a copy of the book, which had been priced at $2.50. (Copies of the Texas Book Club edition occasionally surface, selling at $125 or higher.) The memoir recounts Beasley’s difficult ...”

“... At long last, the Republicans would have made up for the devastating rejection of Robert Bork, who would now appear as an originalist prophet wrongly denied admission to the holy temple of the law. But it was not to be. 2005 was the year of the Iraq debacle, the Katrina fiasco, the DeLay scandal. The president’s challenge to Social Security ...”

“... of the original police investigations. The ‘Doctor’s Tale’ outlines the findings of the young – by Home Office pathologist standards – Dr Peter Acland, whose expert testimony (subsequently challenged by a more experienced Welsh pathologist) was somewhat undermined by an astonishing letter to the Times, in which he said: ‘I do not know who ...”

“... and tore away ‘every illusion’ he had ‘ever held about the Jewish state’. And for Robert Fisk, who no longer had illusions about that or anything else, it was a year in which he escaped death a score of times and lived to produce some of the most memorable journalism of the decade. Sharon’s book is a surprise, for it contains little about ...”

“... as the decline of its importance into what, so ironic for the Nights, we call bedtime stories. Robert Irwin’s Companion will describe how these humble and mainly entertaining street stories grew into an enormously influential masterpiece. He will talk about the way the themes in these stories manifest themselves; he will point out their motifs and ...”

“... the amusing discovery of a how-d’ye-do as we come to know Him and Her. In the case of Robert Nye’s The Memoirs of Lord Byron, it is less a question of discovering an interesting personality than of retrieving or rehabilitating one. The basis of the fiction here is a historical fact – that after his death, Lord Byron’s Memoirs were burned by ...”

“... under the Race Relations Act with inciting racial hatred. Leamington Spa at that time was home to Robert Relf, a leader of something called the ‘British Movement’, who had made a name for himself earlier in the 1970s by advertising his house for sale ‘to a white family only’. I don’t remember exactly what Relf’s involvement was in the case that I ...”

“... Some, it turns out, have a further distance to migrate than others. One of Simpson’s lawyers, Robert Kardashian (you knew it was only a matter of time before the Kardashians came into it), played by David Schwimmer in the TV series, was perfectly certain in life of his friend’s innocence, yet, in TV-land, certainty is just a crease to be ironed out by ...”

“... sunset was never exactly a paragon of family values. A boy in the 1950s, the heyday of the genre, Robert Pippin grew up steeped in the Western. He watched them both on television (his favourite show was Have Gun, Will Travel) and ‘all day Saturdays at the movies (ten in the morning until six at night) … one Western after another’. Growing up in Havana ...”

“... work was undertaken to remove centuries of dirt and mistreatment. What emerged was the image of a young man, pale but vigorous, with alert blue eyes and strong arms, playing a lute. In front of him on a table stands a small replica of the Belvedere Antinous, a piece of paper and a quill. The paper is inscribed with the epigram ‘Ut Relevet Miserum Fatum ...”