“... Robert Gildea’s subject is less French history than French ‘political culture’. His method eschews ‘the theorising pretensions of the Marxist and the Annales schools’ without ‘reducing history to one senseless deed of violence after another’, as he presumes (wrongly) Simon Schama to have done. Also to be avoided is Theodore Zeldin’s pointilliste description of isolated individuals, moving through time and space like ‘rogue electrons ...”

“... The fascination of this theme seems as strong as ever, perhaps affecting our curiosity about Robert Maxwell, as well as our taste for the works of Thubron or Theroux. But today, when jumbo jets deposit increasing numbers of ordinary people in the middle of totally unfamiliar cultures which are now only a few flying hours away, it may be time to start ...”

“... between London and Paris? Churchill crops up again, and again and again, in the diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. This is odd in a way, for there is only one occasion recorded here when he met him. Bruce Lockhart, however, was often in the company of people who had themselves just met the great man, and having earned part of his living through ...”

“... More recently, doubts have deepened and the practice has come to be questioned at a radical level. Robert Frost’s ornery dictum, that poetry is ‘what gets lost in translation’, has acquired classic gobbet status, and it is certainly hard to argue against that verdict. We like to think that a poem, if it has any value, possesses a quiddity for which no ...”

“... editors such as Garvin, press lords like Beaverbrook, businessmen like the elder Sir Robert Boothby, and above all the political eminence of Churchill, to forge the most improbable of political careers. In Michael Foot’s deadly phrase, Bracken was the classic ‘leather-lounged adventurer’, worming his way insidiously up the Tory ...”

“... himself, though Michael Brock, who was at school with him, provides some important details, and Robert O’Neill pays tribute to his labours in the Oxford History Faculty. A festschrift often consists of a somewhat miscellaneous collection of bits and pieces. On this occasion the editors have assembled a sequence of essays which coherently reflects the ...”

“... so horrible that Canadians themselves have scarcely begun to think coherently about what it means. Robert Neild’s careful but passionate research shows exactly how such things happen, and how they can be prevented. In the case of the oyster, they order this matter better in France. Government involvement in industry and in organising food production, even to ...”

“... eccentric margins of American conservatism have become part of the mainstream. Miller’s study of Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, presents a plausible account of America’s slow descent from the 1950s into the abyss of post-truth politics. Welch has tended to be written off as a not particularly successful ‘candyman’. But this is ...”

“... homosexuality as given, but writes as though it did not become open until the appearance of Robert Kerr in 1607. Twenty years ago Roger Lockyer initiated a serious reappraisal of the homosexual ambience at James’s Court in his biography of Buckingham. One would have expected a fuller discussion of this important subject from the author of Close ...”

“... Robert Edric specialises in historical backwaters. His novels, 19 to date, unfold in isolated fishing villages, colonial outposts or Alpine spa towns. What these places have in common is that they seem removed from larger political conflicts, though they replay them in claustrophobic miniature. Edric’s imagination has always been drawn to the peripheral, to characters who are set apart, or seeking a geography to match their sense of spiritual exile ...”

“... And just as Gresham College, home of the Royal Society, was buzzing with the stooped mutterings of Robert Boyle, John Aubrey and Robert Hooke, so, Wall suggests, the unknown woman at home, experimenting with endive and plantin, or (in Partridge’s words) trussing woodcocks ‘into the Coffyn with swete larde around ...”

“... It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976 ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Boulder, Colorado, agreed to go for a ride in his father’s Packard with her 21-year-old suitor Robert Lowell. They had met the year before at a Colorado Writers’ Conference, and Lowell had been courting her intensely through the mails. When she refused to marry him, however, Lowell went into a rage and crashed the car into an embankment. He was unhurt ...”