“... the surface the big story was that Bush had finally sacked Rumsfeld, and installed the pragmatic Robert Gates in his place. But the more important story – concealed from the public – was that the president’s senior military advisers had lost all credibility: when it came to setting policy, the views of the active-duty four stars no longer mattered. By ...”

“... range of flourishing Shakespeareans – from Stephen Greenblatt to Stanley Cavell, Lynda Boose to Robert Weimann – who are catalogued and castigated, chapter by chapter, under the usual demonised labels: as deconstructionists, New Historicists, psychoanalytic critics, feminists and Marxists (who share their section, less predictably, with Christians). Given ...”

“... As a young soldier in Germany at the end of the war I was dropped head first into two manifestations of the Third Reich which half a century later continue to exert a peculiar fascination. After two months in what became the Russian occupied zone, the field company to which I belonged was moved back to the Harz Mountains area. We were told we would henceforth be located in somewhere called Lebenstedt ...”

“... a point. For instance, she privately draws doom-ridden conclusions from her supposed descent from Robert FitzRoy, who committed suicide, like his uncle Castlereagh, and like her father, who wasn’t married to her mother, but left her his name – which he didn’t spell in the supposedly ancestral fashion with a capital in the middle. That spelling Charlotte ...”

“... the market was for ‘bilingual’ dictionaries (especially Latin-English). We had to wait upon Robert Cawdrey in 1604 for a ‘monolingual’ model – aimed at ‘Ladies … or other unskilfull persons’. But the principles and goals are essentially the same. We don’t look up door to find that it means the chunk of material that seals off rooms and ...”

“... measure of admiration as a scholar, a lawyer, a writer and a politician; for there is much in Robert Bolt’s adulatory A Man for All Seasons which reflects what we know of More. But More was not simply a principled Catholic; he was also something of a fanatic. The Victorian historian J.A. Froude described him as a merciless bigot. He described himself in ...”

“... years in government. The miasma of corruption wreathes Badenoch’s most plausible challenger, Robert Jenrick, who has been pumping out Reform-tinged jeremiads on X. Polling suggests he’d be even less popular. Given its efflux of activists and politicians to Reform, the eventual fate of the Conservatives may be as a vestigial electoral appendage, a ...”

“... like the word “dissociate”’, the vice president, Hubert Humphrey, and the defence secretary, Robert McNamara, confirmed that ‘the prime minister’s position was well understood’ and ‘there would be no hard feelings.’ As the war in Vietnam progressed, however, opposition among the public and inside the Labour Party increased, and by late 1967 ...”

“... and close relationships with senior figures in the Elizabethan regime, such as William Cecil and Robert Dudley. His activities abroad were instrumental in his appointment as principal secretary to the queen in 1573, which marked the beginning of nearly two decades of virtually uninterrupted activity at the heart of government. Cooper’s portrait necessarily ...”

“... and unproblematic, even something of an anticlimax’. Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Robert Cecil, had without her knowledge masterminded a succession plan, starting a clandestine correspondence with James two years before her death. Accordingly, James had been shown the proclamation announcing his accession that was read aloud at Richmond Palace ...”

“... vulgarity of Browning’; meets Walter de la Mare but records, ‘we had little to say’; judges Robert Graves to be an Ass; declares it ‘possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity’; refers to ‘greasy Epstein’, and to his admirer W.H. Auden as belonging (mysteriously) with ‘the corduroy panzers’; dismisses the Poet Laureate as ‘poor old John ...”

“... in his final legacy; ignoring likewise the claims of later secretaries such as Peter Quennell and Robert Gathorne-Hardy, he bestowed the prize on the latest incumbent, the young John Russell. It was a bitter blow at the time to Connolly, who never found it easy to remain solvent, and who tended with an insouciance which has something rather admirable about it ...”

“... Neanderthals did not range far from home, so never developed similar links with their own kind. As Robert Foley shows in Humans before Humanity, Darwinian gradualism means that we crossed no particular cultural rubicon. Whatever it is that makes us human may depend on the complex interaction of all sorts of small changes in human reproductive and social ...”

“... dressed in a different way – The quids’ idea of a holiday. ‘The Quids’ was admired by Robert Graves, who wrote a letter to Riding, inviting her to visit him and his wife in London. Riding would stay with Graves, first in London, then in Majorca, first in a ménage à trois, then as sole proprietor, for 14 years, from 1926 to 1940. London literary ...”

“... came to power 20 years later, he formally rehabilitated Bukharin. Not Trotsky, however (though Robert Service oddly implies the contrary): like most other Soviet Communists, Gorbachev still had the instinctive revulsion against him acquired in his youth. Even in 1987, he still regarded Trotsky as the quintessential anti-Leninist, though he did allow him to ...”