“... instance, it was said that as the daughter of Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, and granddaughter of Robert II ‘the Pious’, King of France, she proudly refused a marriage proposal from William Duke of Normandy, on the grounds that he was illegitimate and she would not demean herself to marry a bastard. At this, the story goes, William rode up from ...”

“... and helped sustain as well as satirise the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared ...”

“... behind Mallarmé’s obfuscations and Proust’s longueurs to join dependable storytellers like Robert Stone and Joyce Carol Oates. He got mugged by realism. He realised that Elizabeth Bowen is just as good as Virginia Woolf but without the ‘affected prose style’, and that the selling of high art is ‘just one more form of commercialism’. The break ...”

“... like the mechanisms of character. Big things are happening – we soon hear that Wheeler is on the Robert Kennedy campaign trail, and they follow him west – yet Rose is more than ever alert to the influence of her own past on the new life she is trying to imagine for herself. Her reveries, many of them about fathers and memories, are the best moments in the ...”

“... propagated Scottish notions of liberty, improvement, politeness and sentimentality. Rather as Robert Darnton a generation ago diverted scholarly attention from the philosophes to the printers, engravers and booksellers of Paris in The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’, so Sher looks through all that Scottish mind ...”

“... a reconsideration of the work of three unjustly neglected poets, Weldon Kees, Henri Coulette and Robert Boardman Vaughn – though Vaughn can hardly be described as neglected since only three of his poems ever made their way into print. In a preamble to a discussion of their work he broods on the ‘slide or plunge into oblivion that awaits virtually ...”

“... a crisis on the horizon, but they didn’t foresee just how badly things would turn out. Nor did Robert Moses, who had been in charge of city planning since the 1920s, and whose mammoth housing projects and highways had ripped through old neighbourhoods; though he did say that if his plans for New York were abandoned, trouble was inevitable. None of them ...”

“... or all-conquering love is itself one of the points in dispute. So it is in the marriage in Robert Elsmere (1888) between a wife who is an old-fashioned Protestant believer and her modern husband who loses his orthodox faith; or in Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) where the daughter of a secular sceptic falls into bewildered love with a devout ...”

“... there is nothing Scottish about any of them. Percy Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music Like Robert Louis Stevenson living in Samoa, like George MacBeth living in Sheffield, like Ian Brady living in Greater Manchester, I am a Scotsman living in exile; my father was the first of the family to fly South – my grandfather stayed, a Professor in ...”

“... For Robert Adamson A blue smear bulges over the ridge; there’s the counterpoint as well of shine on white-hot duco glimpsed on the ute parked outside on the driveway. It blinds its surrounds with a surfboard beach-effect. It’s as ominous as the Mary Celeste – it looks lonely, isolated parked there, brilliant in tinfoil sharpness of afternoon light ...”

“... of Eternal Damnation. A Valentine’s: Regarding the Impractibility of Our Love Evel Knievel, Robert Craig Knievel of Butte, now that one, that wild . . . The crack-up at Caesar’s Palace in ’68, then trying to clear the 13 Pepsi trucks in Yakima, and just down the road, here at the Cow Palace: You could tell by the way he wore his hair and the white ...”

“... son after nine years in Italy and promptly involve themselves again with Richard’s best friend, Robert, and Robert’s refined cousin and ex-girlfriend, Beatrice. Robert has been trying to lure the uneducated Bertha into betraying Richard (whose avant-garde writing she can’t ...”

“... not be easy to name more recent comedians likely to win his approval. He quotes a letter from Robert Graves which, although it is about the poetry, gives an accurate representation of the way Fuller often sees his personality: ‘oppressed, stoical, humorous’, and not given to ‘chancing his arm’. There are various asides in which he speaks of a ...”

“... The only real difference is that the obliquity is not too well concealed in Sir Robert Armstrong’s impromptu response: in the White Paper it lies low. But there is not much to choose between Armstrong’s fluent evasion and the White Paper’s gracious acceptance of the swingeing injustice of Section 2 (which this government has willingly ...”

“... Office is stirred into action, as it finally was in the Guildford case following publication of Robert Kee’s Trial and Error, that other police officers are sent in to sort out and look over the trial papers. Although this can and sometimes does result in the discovery of malpractice, it is still like putting the fox in charge of the hen-coop. It relies ...”