“... Arthur Gorges adapting Lucan’s verse history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was among the most learned historians of his time. Yet his account of Henry’s reign abandons factual accuracy. Behind it there lies instead the old literary ...”

“... state is if anything marked by an excessive gentility, as all parties seek to keep up appearances. Robert Mugabe would not have found himself shaking hands with Jacques Chirac in Paris if states were as nasty as the individuals they sometimes throw up. The poisonous Ango-French diplomacy of recent weeks is merely the exception that proves this rule. It is the ...”

“... manipulation. The contrast between these two views is perhaps brought out most clearly in Robert Trivers’s seminal article from 1974 on the conflict between parents and offspring. A natural theologian is likely to assume that parents and their developing offspring are engaged in a largely harmonious project, directed at the efficient production of a ...”

“... Recession, that ‘we are all Keynesians now.’ If this is so, then Keynes’s great biographer, Robert Skidelsky, should have much to say about the recession, its causes and the appropriate cures. And so indeed he does. I share with Skidelsky the view that, while most of the blame for the crisis should reside with those in the financial markets, who did ...”

“... Film Festival in 1962) and screenwriter: his credits include Downhill Racer (1969), starring Robert Redford as a champion skier. His novel about mountaineering, Solo Faces (1979), started life as a script for Redford. As well as subsidising some unprofitable novels, the movie business brought Salter into contact with a more hedonistic world: he spent ...”

“... Investigator (1945) ‘Gains from Serendipity’; another was the Columbia sociologist of science Robert Merton, who in a 1946 article described the ‘serendipity pattern’ in sociological research. For the next decade or so, ‘serendipity’ (which by then had narrowed its meaning to a pleasing and unexpected discovery made while looking for something ...”

“... to the author’s patron, or hoped-for patron (some highborn lowbrow nobleman normally), as Robert Herrick’s is posted to the Prince of Wales, and packed with obsequious lies: ‘Well may my Book come forth like Publique Day,/When such a Light as You are leads the way’; the third (often a poem) is from the author to the reader pretending to be a ...”

“... may fail, but an overlooked one will not succeed. According to the Thomas Theorem popularised by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an attack on ...”

“... example, about the names and titles of Foreign Office staff, lurching between Lord Cecil and Sir Robert Cecil for Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Esmie instead of Esme Howard, and Sir Cavendish Bentinck for Victor Cavendish-Bentinck. More seriously, Muggeridge is described as ‘an enthusiastic apologist for Stalin’, when in ...”

“... belatedness with regard to her favourite writers – they include Dostoevsky, Platonov, Kafka and Robert Walser – and a firm grasp of all the aesthetic and intellectual-historical explanations of Why One Can’t Write Like Tolstoy Any More. ‘This story will be composed in bad English,’ one of the two novellas in Private Novelist begins, ‘the ...”

“... came looking for him. For the next twenty or so years he lived abroad at the court of his cousin, Robert of Normandy. He and Alfred remained, however, the last known representatives of ‘the royal blood’ of England. In 1036 both mounted invasions against their stepbrother Harold Harefoot. Neither invasion succeeded. Alfred was captured under obscure ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”

“... pasting of late. During the last century, he was canonised in one way or another by R.W. Chambers, Robert Bolt and the Catholic church. By contrast the More of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historically more credible heretic-burner bent on martyrdom. More’s self-flagellation and habitual wearing of a hair shirt now look less like the pure tokens of virtue ...”

“... role in that most celebrated of literary love affairs, between Elizabeth and her fellow poet Robert Browning. Famously eloping in 1846 to escape her tyrannical father, they honeymooned in Pisa, and it was here one morning that Elizabeth shyly slipped a sheaf of papers into her new husband’s pocket. She hurried back to her private study, leaving ...”

“... stipulation that its holder revert to the full syllabification of his name, and be known as Sir Robert? – sadly populist favourite sits ill on someone advertised in the publicity handouts as ‘The Word Festival Trustee’, since you’d hope for a trustee to come up with something a bit more advanced. The Festival is inviting all those sufficiently ...”