“... Barnett was kicking Charter 88 into life in various basement flats and leftist magazine offices, Robert Alexander accepted ennoblement as a Tory peer in the House of Lords, though his elevation is not mentioned on the cover of The Voice of the People. He is a former leading QC; former chairman of the Bar; former chairman of the City Panel on Takeovers and ...”

“... which was radical in 1965, is uncontroversial today and we now know that it was even held by Robert McNamara at the very time he was ordering the carpet-bombing of Vietnam. Now here’s the interesting thing. Gingrich opposed the war and took a draft deferment every bit as opportunist as Clinton’s. He also supported the Martin Luther King movement, and ...”

“... None of his heroes will be acknowledged in The Oxford Companion to English Literature – except Robert Aickmann (sic) who gets his name misspelled, and he is banished to the ghetto: ‘See ghost stories and horror’. Seabrook’s disinterested championship of Aickman lasted for years and carried him to an interview with Elizabeth Jane Howard, co-author of ...”

“... things in themselves, but in this case curious and curiously revealing. The dedication is to Robert Conquest, ‘premature anti-fascist, premature anti-Stalinist, poet and mentor, and founder of “the united front against bullshit”’. It seems that Conquest is being saluted here principally for having been against a lot of things; this appears to be ...”

“... Poems (1932), Reconstruction (1933) – as Georgian, countryside-centred and influenced by Robert Bridges, changing swiftly to Auden’s ‘manifesto manner’ for Difficult Morning (also 1933). I am not sure about this, especially the implicit conflict between country and town: Swingler always seems to inhabit either with ease. Certainly, he inclined ...”

“... by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen ...”

“... Europe made it impossible for him to keep the faith. Recollections vary, however. According to Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a ...”

“... in the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations. For hawks, such as the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump’s favourite economic adviser, Peter Navarro, the question is why the effort to enrol China in the world economy was undertaken in the first place, and who benefited from an experiment that has gone so badly wrong.The crude Trumpian ...”

“... German, French, and Italian – Austrian lawyer, Jew, perfect typist, wants a position – Dr Robert Fischer, Deutschmesiterplatz 2, Vienna I.’28 July 1938: ‘Young Jewess, opera and concert singer, music teacher, Vienna Music Academy with honours, besides well-trained doctor’s assistant, speaking French, Italian, German, perfect household ...”

“... over which time passes-a false light. In his introduction to the New Collected Works, Michael Davidson calls Discrete Series a ‘rather modest book’, but this is true only of its size. Andrew Crozier is surely right to say, in Modern American Poetry (1984), that it is ‘almost too deliberately calculated, with an unconcealed but obscure ...”

“... aid and comfort to the Islamists’ struggle against the global hegemony of the United States. Robert Irwin London I have been reluctant to comment on the recent ‘events’ because the event in question, as history, is incomplete and one can even say that it has not yet fully happened. Obviously there are immediate comments one can make, in particular on ...”

“... of ideological nuance. Consider Reg Prentice (Labour to Tory), Shaun Woodward (Tory to Labour) and Robert Jackson (Tory to Labour), all of whom defected directly from one of the two main parties to the other, when a more gentle transition to the Liberal middle ground might have carried more ideological plausibility. In any case the gulfs within parties can ...”

“... isn’t clear that British politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as such: ‘an acknowledgment of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from ...”

“... of 1605 survive. What has changed over the centuries is the way it is heard. As the musicologist Michael Noone recently observed, ‘That an early 17th-century work by a Spanish priest-composer for the funeral of a retired Habsburg empress has become staple fodder for the international choral concert repertory in the early 21st century … is a subject ...”

“... history. A similar model or map of culture is implicit in the work of historians in other fields: Michael Baxandall, for example, has explored the possible relation between cultural practices as different as painting, gauging barrels, and calligraphy, and Roger Chartier is concerned, like Greenblatt, with both practices and representations, and above all with ...”