“... Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966. Crossman’s predecessor, Kenneth Robinson, had appointed Howe to chair an inquiry into scandalous allegations, made in the News of thr World, of cruelty, torture and theft at Ely Hospital, a psychiatric institution near Cardiff. Howe’s final report had been submitted in September 1968, a month ...”

“... through to ‘government’ were taken almost verbatim from an act passed during the reign of Charles II, but the addition of the word ‘constitution’ had the advantage of introducing a term that could mean almost anything the crown lawyers might choose. It was clearly impossible to utter a syllable of discontent which they could not impute to a ...”

“... Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr Wordsworth’ was in fact the poet’s cousin Robinson Wordsworth, collector of customs at Harwich, who was being paid for expenses incurred in arresting and taking to London two men accused of treason. He also showed that De Leutre was an English agent rather than a French spy. And so Johnston’s exciting ...”

“... Stravinsky debonair in double-breasted suit photographed in Los Angeles by his friend Edward G. Robinson; a merry Stravinsky at a recording session (of The Rake’s Progress), one hand holding a cigarette, the other in conjunction with a whisky bottle. The implacability of the man stays stamped on his photographed features till the end – strongly marked ...”

“... that when he was a child in the 1820s Lady Hester Stanhope’s name was as well known to him as Robinson Crusoe’s, though he thought Crusoe was more believable. A century later, her table-talk (retailed in six volumes by her doctor-companion, Charles Meryon, and first published in 1845-46) was still being studied for ...”

“... and the cosmopolitanism of a great seaport. Previous literary exiles had included Stendhal, Charles Lever and Richard Burton. In addition, Trieste had its own literary world: Futurism flourished there, Marinetti visited frequently and contributed to local papers, and Joyce’s pupil and friend Ettore Schmitz would later – encouraged by his teacher ...”

“... footage of the meetings chaired by the British Leyland trade union convenor Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson, but would I really catch a glimpse there of a peeping child in the colours of Rees-Mogg’s old prep school? At the time Robinson quit the national stage, Rees-Mogg was ten years old. Rees-Mogg’s adoration of ...”

“... culture never materialised. Though Dryden always remained loyal to his ungrateful master [i.e. Charles 11] he was to devote much of his writing to the absurdities and tyrannies of those who wield power. This last sentence may be true, but it does reduce a satirical artist’s main motive to self-interest. Hammond is surely damaging Dryden in his attempt ...”

“... of commiseration among the whole’. Wordsworth’s Prelude meanwhile praised the beauty of Mary Robinson, the ‘Maid of Buttermere’, and that and the panegyric of her in Budworth’s Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes (1792) made her famous as an object of connoisseurship. But fame attracts notch-cutters, scalp-hunters. Poor Mary was deceived by a con-man ...”

“... no acknowledgment of the debates over women’s rights, sexuality and reproduction in which Mary Robinson, for example, established her reputation. Indeed, one could read through this whole anthology without ever confronting the idea that sexuality has been a vexatious political issue in Irish history. Even Terence Brown’s introduction to the useful ...”

“... bicycle tour of France has something of all of these about it. Like Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space (1997), which pursues the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by nuclear power stations and motorways, Robb covers French space and time ...”

“... Aldiss, Philip K. Dick (‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’), A.E. Van Vogt, Kim Stanley Robinson and a range of others. Jameson has always been an energetic retriever of the neglected and maligned, and a brilliant salvage job here on Charles Fourier reflects this tendency. So, less happily, does a lengthy ...”

“... disposable trash but high-end productions for fashionable consumers. By comparison, typo-strewn Robinson Crusoe and cramped, crowded Pamela start to look downmarket. But King’s most brilliant recoveries – and this book is full of them – were made on the screen. Before digitisation a few years back, no scholar poring over the Burney Newspaper ...”

“... T.R. Morris of the Royal Horse Artillery, who died on 13 October 1917, or that of Captain S.O. Robinson, who died on 5 November 1917. In the centre of the cemetery is a monument to General Sir Stanley Maude, who captured Baghdad in 1917 and died of cholera six months later. The long rows of graves carry the message that however bad the current crisis in ...”

“... of bat and ball, so Victorian educators sought to frogmarch sport into the service of empire. Charles Kingsley, an obsessive practitioner of all country sports, and Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and himself a boxing coach, had worked with all their formidable energies to cleanse Christianity of its tendencies to ...”