“... of Lesley Dunn in 1981 (of which, curiously, only 21 are included here) have been compared by Robert Nye to the poems written by Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife, and by Jonathan Raban to In Memoriam. The subject is a precarious one for poetry, and Dunn has not always succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls. Poems like ‘Dining’ and ...”

“... intensified and projected onto a global stage, is in Dower’s view either delusional or cynically self-serving. It led to the launch of a war on ‘evil’ under the sign of humanitarianism and with the assumed imprimatur of God – biblical quotations, mostly from Old Testament prophets, appeared on Bush’s briefing papers during Operation Iraqi ...”

“... Generalissimo’s diary is still one of the main sources for the Xi’an Incident, though it is self-serving and was probably redrafted. One of the difficulties of writing about him is the paucity of new material: there has been nothing comparable to the publication of Mao’s secret speeches or the revelations of his doctor. Biographers have always had a ...”

“... my father and married my mother – but would not be confined to it, and this is the kind of plot Robert Belknap is most interested in. He doesn’t neglect causality, but he likes it best when it goes what he calls ‘fractal’, when narrative turns take further turns, as ‘a fractal curve has kinks, and kinks on the kinks, and smaller kinks on those ...”

“... At first glance the new series was just as disconnected from public concerns. James Comey and Robert Mueller might be on people’s minds, but on Twin Peaks the salient FBI boss is still Gordon Cole, a hearing-impaired, gee-whizzily cryptic character played by Lynch himself. We first caught up with him in a conference room, where a subordinate showed him ...”

“... a liberal reform of the franchise in 1870, Russia’s town halls continued to be run by small self-interested circles of wealthy merchants and patricians, who stalled urgent social expenditures to keep taxes low. By the turn of the century, the working-class districts of Russia’s great cities looked more like Bombay than Berlin. Poor and overcrowded ...”

“... their napkins. Usvatov is not a hypocrite, indeed he hardly has the strength for it, but he is self-deceiving almost beyond redemption. He is supposed to be a playwright, although his plays are written for him by an obsequious young colleague, always on tap, and when a distinguished old horror of a guest toasts his ‘creativity’ he even manages a few ...”

“... of art, Gombrich turns his attention to the ceiling painting, an ‘Allegory of Truth’ by Robert Streeter. By a fortunate chance he has an ideal text ready to hand in a contemporary description of Streeter’s picture by Robert Whitehall, which ends with the words: That future ages must confess they owe To Streeter ...”

“... stands aside from the general course of imaginative fiction. It is probably meant to do so. Robert Stone is also engaged with political disaster. His earlier novel Dog Soldiers was about the legacy of corruption left to America by the Vietnam War. In A Flag for Sunrise the theme is American incursion into the Third World. The scene is the small corrupt ...”

“... enough – to celebrate Cobden’s rejection of armed intervention whatever the cause, his self-chosen role as an international man. But it was as a Manchester man that Cobden came to be most generally regarded. Before and after the Second World War, a succession of books presented him as a spokesman for the industrial North, as a prime exemplar of ...”

“... to illuminate their understanding of old familiar scenes. Among the professionals must be included Robert and Monica Beckinsale; among the self-confessed amateurs, Richard Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English ...”

“... in certain purification rites could be thrown outside the sanctuary of the god. Robert Parker is the first scholar to have considered all these different aspects of pollution, and to show how they relate to one another, and he does so without trying to impose on them a conceptual framework that would give priority either to the physical or ...”

“... that a former propagandist should take their formal recitation of Leninist phrases at face value. Robert Service’s Lenin trilogy is a work of a very different kind. The final volume covering the period from the spring of 1918 to Lenin’s death has benefited from access to some of the sources used by Volkogonov, though far from all, which is a pity since ...”

“... Robert Darnton’s reputation was founded on his monumental The Business of Enlightenment (1979). In this study of ‘the life-cycle of a single book’ Darnton tracked the creation, manufacture, distribution and reception of the fourth edition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, 1775-1800. His account drew on the archive of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, on the Franco-Swiss border ...”

“... Mythology was once defined by Robert Graves as the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that he cannot believe them to be true. Mythical stories are disturbing and invite disbelief; but our own myths are so taken for granted as to be largely invisible. Conventional encyclopedias of mythology exclude Biblical narratives ...”