“... Mod wideboys? Doubtless it was never quite so cut and dried. Skim the sub rosa lit of the time (Robin Cook, Alexander Baron, Colin MacInnes) and you’re plunged into a lost river with discrete but commingled tributaries: gay, criminal, East End Jewish, upper-class drop-out, lower-class dandy; the ‘morries’ of ...”

“... from the start; posthumous membership should no doubt be awarded to John Smith, Donald Dewar and Robin Cook. The reformulation of Britishness remains high on their devolutionary agenda, but New Labour politicians can be seen carefully distancing themselves from the English question just as, in the dawn of their power, they used to avoid, on the advice ...”

“... dispute, particularly one that was not my departmental responsibility.’ So he shirked it, unlike Robin Cook, who showed what could be known about what was not known at the time. Brown now feels that ‘we were all misled on the existence of WMDs.’ In fact, he is convinced that the Bush administration duped them: ‘Somewhere in the American system the ...”

“... late as 1772, the distinguished naturalist Sir Joseph Banks fell out, preposterously, with Captain Cook because Cook would not let him take an entourage which included two french-horn players to the South Seas on board the good ship Resoultion. (Banks and his musicians went to Iceland instead.) Exotic and a little ...”

“... us to work out in a made-up setting what we hope to manage in real life. The game designer Robin Laws classifies stories, and moments within stories, as either procedural (characters try to accomplish a concrete end – capture the leopard, solve the murder) or dramatic (characters change one another through their interactions). A James Bond film is ...”

“... in policy circles for his own tripartite schema of current political practices. He had the ear of Robin Cook and is now said to have the ear of Jack Straw (though Tony Blair, typically, blows hot and cold). In The Post-Modern State and the World Order, Cooper divides the world up into pre-modern, modern and post-modern states. Pre-modern states ...”

“... of him). The recollections he recorded are embarrassingly saccharine: ‘He was such a good cook that he could make any intellectual food nutritious and tasty, no matter whether the subject was zoology, botany or physics.’ Despite his obvious aptitude, Mendel lacked the formal qualifications required of a Gymnasium teacher and sought to make amends by ...”

“... be possible to make real progress (more progress than Blair has achieved, for all his big talk). Robin Cook’s careful, persistent unpicking of the government’s Iraq policy also offers a way out of the Manichean nightmare of the war on terror. Of course, a Labour government led by Brown, with Cook as foreign ...”

“... collaborator Michael Questier (a team recently described by a witty Jesuit as ‘the Batman and Robin of Elizabethan and Jacobean religious studies’) extended their reading to the contemporary accounts of Catholic traitors/martyrs, in prison and on the scaffold (and it is here that ‘Robin’, an authority on ...”

“... Social Chapter, followed by the restoration of the Civil Service unions to GCHQ. Then came Robin Cook’s declaration in favour of a landmine ban – achieved by the simple, but effective, technique of failing to inform the Ministry of Defence in advance. Then there was the cancellation of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay ...”

“... Robin Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other words, don’t just write for the trade ...”

“... or Companion-Help. Austrian lady, age 40, good birth and education, seeks post: good cook, needlewoman, fluent English, French; pianist; willing to care for children; highest credentials. Write Box 4435, Frost-Smith Advertising, London EC2.’27 May 1938: ‘Young Austrian lady (Jewish) seeks position Governess; experienced; good ...”

“... studies, its sympathy with poets, translators, excitable theorists, its egalitarianism. Robin Blackburn on slavery, Angela Livingstone on Tsvetaeva, Ernesto Laclau’s charismatic mystifications. Dawn Ades’s work on Latin America inspired artists from all over the continent to donate paintings and sculpture, so it has a collection unrivalled by ...”

“... diary that ‘we were heartily glad to be rid of her, she fouling our house mightily.’ Captain Cook had more success when the Resolution arrived in Woolwich in 1775, carrying birds and animals purchased by Johann Reinhold Forster, the expedition’s naturalist, in South Africa, and intended for the queen. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was waiting ...”

“... her mother told of Fa Mu Lan. In a less diluted Water Margin epic, she is a kind of Maid Marian as Robin Hood (‘My army did not rape, only taking food where there was an abundance. We brought order wherever we went’), or a female avenger, at times a Bruce Lee in drag. She defeats a giant, who changes into his true shape, a snake – whereupon his disgusted ...”