“... accounts for the civil war of the 15th.’ ‘Discuss,’ as they say in exam papers. Lawrence Stone contributes a long article on ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London in the 17th Century’, which combines the two subjects on which he is always at his best – architecture and the aristocracy. Much land to the west of the City passed ...”

“... windows, and kicked in the metal, bawling and spitting at the alarmed passengers cowering inside. Robert Johnston’s murder, in the broad daylight of Rottenrow, brought a great deal of feeling against Irish Catholics and their Glaswegian offspring, some of which has never entirely gone. The riot in the East End seemed, to many, like the behaviour of a ...”

“... to the Freeze generation. The names he mentions, especially Josef Beuys and Bruce Nauman, but also Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton and Jeff Koons, certainly make sense when we look at much of the work on show in Sensation – although, naturally enough, everything that the Young British Artists (more affectionately known as YBAs) absorbed has been given a ...”

“... records or laying plans to snuff her out. Prominent among these writers are Milo Speriglio and Robert Slatzer (a bit of a cross-category-turn this last one: he claims to have been married to Monroe for three days). There is a new addition to this group, a hysterical book by Donald H. Wolfe which may just prove to be the conspiracy sub-genre’s reductio ad ...”

“... friend of the Slavs had fallen beneath the bullets of Slavic fanatics.’ He thrilled that ‘a stone had been set rolling whose course could no longer be arrested’ and enlisted in the German army.A different response to the assassination is found in the opening pages of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921), when the garrulous Czech learns ...”

“... After two. Just at the gate. My heart! His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir Thomas Deane was the Greek architecture. This cannot be mere embarrassment; he is afraid – unreasonably, perhaps – that Boylan will beat him up. He must make some firm plan (fearless of the risk to Stephen). Some may feel that Stephen would refuse ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”

“... writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same year, 1895. The postwar life has its doldrums, and for a biographer the narrative sails are hard to hoist. For his full-dress Life, three decades in the making, Dilworth adopts a chronicle approach, breaking his close-grained ...”

“... later. ‘Better go down dignified/ With boughten friendship at your side/Than none at all,’ Robert Frost wrote. Roussel’s boughten friendships with Janet and Dufrène explored the feasibility and not unsuccessful consequences of Frost’s idea. When La Doublure appeared it received almost no attention. The second review, published five months after ...”

“... The​ Soft Machine drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and prudence, ‘imported tea’ every afternoon, ‘with some little tea wafers’, partly in order to ease himself off martinis (Elsie, his ‘Pam’, disapproved of his drinking) – but otherwise everything is different ...”

“... and a vigorous force on the folk music scene.) In 1935, the year of the general election, Robert Conquest stood as the Communist candidate in the mock election at Winchester and Frank deputised for him during the campaign. Some of the teachers were happy to see the boys thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that ...”

“... the Love Child of Camilla Parker-Bowles and Wayne Rooney. She who every morning plays a gallant Robert Browning to my late-rising, half-paralytic Elizabeth Barrett – get thee up from thy bed, thou fat lazy kitten-slug, and take that nun’s twat off thy head. Here, I’ve bought thee a clip-on pedometer and thou wilt walk ten thousand steps up and down ...”

“... entered the federal prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, where he discovered Scientology, read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and first heard the Beatles. From Scientology, he took ideas that he would combine with Carnegie’s: let the other fellow think he was an immortal spiritual being; exploit his traumatic ...”

“... the Little Capacon River. My friend was saying that a lot of the American poets right now, like Robert Hass, the Poet Laureate, are not actually writing poetry at all: ‘they’re involved in a warding off of the poetic moment,’ he said, ‘they see that they have something in their hand, then they talk it away.’ The road was winding and narrow, and we ...”

“... the Prisoner of Chillon tells us, ‘no feeling – none –/Among the stones I stood a stone’). In his storytelling, Byron likes both to withhold information and provide too much of it, sometimes contriving ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake. In The Giaour, one character’s ‘swarthy visage spake distress’ – ‘but,’ Byron adds, ‘this ...”