“... for Robert Foster and Nancy Fried I am come to this town, over which the sun is shining, the insects briefly silenced in the renewed air of the morning, and the turnpike from the capital momentarily empty, for my wedding. I lie alone in a motel room a mile out of town and two from the campus, the wrong end of the wrong street ...”

“... brief lives of 15 artists who contributed to the New York school in its early years. While Robert Carleton Hobbs overstresses the importance of peripheral vision in accounting for their fuzziness, his freshness of approach (shared with his collaborator Gail Levin), and the new material gathered at first hand from survivors, make this book an essential ...”

“... By a happy chance, the occasion marks also the completion of the publication of Pepys’s Diary by Robert Latham. Strictly speaking, publication of the actual Diary was completed with Volume 9 in 1976. What now crowns the work is Volume 10, the Companion, composed of miscellaneous though relevant essays, and Volume 11, the Index.* In my opinion, Pepys’s ...”

“... friends: The party was graced by the presence of Michael Foot and Lord Blake. Soon afterwards Robert Blake struck me off his visiting-list because I had opposed the witch-hunt at the British Academy against Anthony Blunt. I am glad to record that Blake has now forgiven me, or perhaps he thinks I have purged my offence. At any rate, I am now restored to ...”

“... has made his own creative explorations of the Beethoven (Pastoral Symphony) sketches, and he cites Robert Winter’s absorbing sketch analysis (in Beethoven Studies 2) of the C sharp minor string quartet, where five structural plans, or ‘tonal overviews’, are posited. We must not expect to find such speculative stuff in the volume under review, whose ...”

“... from 1931 to the year of his death, 1963: mostly reviews of Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, a few cultural pronouncements, comments on translations of Greek tragedies – he was happy schoolmastering Gilbert Murray, R.C. Trevelyan, Robert Fitzgerald, and Christopher Logue – and some lively words on ...”

“... work ethic. He was going to get the job done and nothing would distract him. He looked more like Robert Shaw, the great villain in From Russia with Love, than like any other Bond. He was unshaken, unstirred; dogged not feline, a terrier who made us wonder what those sleek, overdressed catlike figures had been doing these 44 years. Even his smart suits looked ...”

“... and Macke are shown looking in the direction of Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Rousseau, Sonia and Robert Delaunay. It wasn’t so much about France as it was about making oneself modern – which, at least up until the Second World War, was impossible without France. Nationalist painters and critics attacked Marc, Macke and their followers for selling Germany ...”

“... Making simplifying assumptions of the kind common in economics, Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton devised an elegant way of doing just that. Their mathematical model of options prices was quickly picked up by options traders, who started to use it in Chicago’s crowded trading pits. In so doing, they changed patterns of options prices (which ...”

“... be told the thoughts of a character who has hitherto been described only from the outside. Robert Watson seems to have been undecided as to whether to write a realistic, if lurid novel about the problems of family life, or a quasi-allegorical story about the condition-of-Wales question. His book lunges clumsily in different directions. But what ...”

“... John Robert Seeley was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge between Kingsley and Acton. One of the few eminent Victorians who inspired no memorial biography, he was best remembered as the author of The Expansion of England (1883), a sweeping historical manifesto in favour of the unification of the British Empire ...”

“... from looped cords or ribbons. A Lilliputian pair by Hilliard showing Elizabeth I and her favourite Robert Dudley nestles in the palm of a mannequin’s hand in a manner that instantly, and vividly, communicates their exceptionally small size – and by extension, hinting at the frisson of secrecy that must have accompanied their exchange.Other miniatures are ...”

“... in the election. The SPD dropped to 16 per cent of the vote, a 138-year low. Tainted by its leader Robert Habeck’s determination to co-operate with Merz’s next government, the Greens – until recently the vanguard party of what Nancy Fraser calls ‘progressive neoliberalism’ – were punished severely, and reduced to such embarrassing moves as having ...”

“... a sort of glorified guide to the exhibition by Hermione Hobhouse, and a first-class biography by Robert Rhodes James.* Albert took a long time to receive his deserts. Indeed I doubt whether he was fully appreciated during his lifetime. He was a foreigner. He disliked the rigmarole of court life and he was altogether too clever. The Great Exhibition of ...”

“... libre ou mourir’, but that wouldn’t have rhymed with ‘holocauste fort’. Plenty of Hubert Robert (‘du plus pur Hubert Robert,’ as Jouve used to say). Found a Folio series edition of Restif de la Bretonne’s Nuits de Paris in the tempting bookshop. When I first knew the Marais in the late Forties it was ...”