“... a development Lanier would help to introduce to Britain. This was the era of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, when the masque was at its extravagant height under James I, and in 1613, around the time this portrait was painted, Lanier composed his first masque song, ‘Bring away this sacred tree’, and performed it at court in The Squires’ Masque. Lanier was ...”

“... they concluded, was a far more important factor in Nkrumah’s ideological make-up. Later, it was Roger Hollis of MI5 who brought the unwelcome news to the government of the ill-fated Central African Federation that Soviet communism wasn’t the threat in their part of Africa that they liked to paint it, mainly in order to get American support. This is not ...”

“... took his editorial role to be. The need for editorial intervention was far more clearcut with Roger Sales’s book on the Romantic period. It’s hard to envisage what went on in Williams’s mind when he let this one through. True, Sales obeys the editorial brief in one respect better than Coleman does: he writes free-wheeling essays on themes he ...”

“... about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed Aslan’s ...”

“... stuck it on auto-repeat for whole frazzled nights at a time. It was the British light entertainer Roger Whittaker’s ‘The Last Farewell’. Presley may genuinely not have realised how far gone into addiction he was, because unlike most addicts he never had to go without. With his very own circle of tame doctors (the kind Burroughs would call ‘real ...”

“... her, we see him, out of focus, emerge from the dust of the bomb-blast. The shot is well framed – Roger Pratt deserves his Oscar nomination for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of ...”

“... lack of large-mindedness ‘does not prevent Updike from imagining him largely’, as Roger Sale put it in the New York Times, though they are stretched when very literary formulations are meant to be Ben’s unspoken words: ‘Each tree stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summer’s discarded yellow petticoat.’ This seems too sharply ...”

“... on ‘Belief and Ritual’ is fascinating. Anyone who has read A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (2011), or Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen (1960), or even followed the Marvel Comics series Thor, will already know about Odin and Loki, fire giants, frost giants and the Midgard Serpent. But it’s astonishing how much of what we know comes from a single ...”

“... were if the book started with some such sentence as ‘Alison’s mother, Margaret, had married Roger’s father, Clive, so this was a sort of family honeymoon.’ The phrase ‘family honeymoon’ does appear, but later on, at a point when most readers will have got their bearings. The main cast is completed by the housekeeper, Nancy, and her ...”

“... child, and although it is not a historical book Forguson includes chapters on G.E. Moore and Reid. Roger Gallie’s book Thomas Reid and the ‘Way of Ideas’ rambles most unhelpfully at times, and would have benefited considerably from the use of a spelling checker. Nevertheless it too may be saluted in passing as another sign of the increasing interest in ...”

“... attitude towards her heroine adopted by such right-royal writers of an earlier generation as Roger Fulford. And she is no less critical of the condescending tone that characterised Aspinall’s highly selective edition of Mrs Jordan’s letters, which also unduly influenced subsequent writers (notably Brian Fothergill) who depended on them. Above ...”

“... was rarely out of the news in the spring of 1909. On 3 May 1909, the painter Philip Burne-Jones noted in a letter to the Times that if the painting should ‘find a home in America … its days are practically numbered … No painting can survive many years in the overheated atmosphere of American rooms or galleries.’ The next day the Daily Graphic ...”

“... reign ended with his deposition less than a decade later, when a long-simmering conflict with Roger Mortimer spilled into open war. According to conventional accounts, he was captured by his enemies in the winter of 1326, shuffled around a bit while the nobility decided what to do with him, and then quietly murdered at Berkeley Castle in the late summer ...”

“... to Mike Molloy, a Mirror reporter. Molloy confronts Gould, who refers him to his solicitor, Sir Roger Pelham. A few minutes later when the phone rang again Raymond still hadn’t moved. He picked up the receiver, his hand still shaking. Pelham confirmed that Molloy had been in touch with him.      ‘I presume you made no comment,’ said ...”

“... with the Mediterranean, an injustice which the Collected Poems, intelligently edited by Roger Bowen, seeks to put right. The volume shows how travel encouraged in Spencer both a casual, accumulative mode of observation, the poet noting with curiosity what other travellers might miss or think unworthy of mention (a watchdog on a building-site, a ...”