“... Mary is a constant witness to her intense irritation with Claire: Heigh ho, the Claire and the May Find something to fight about every day she wrote in her diary while Shelley was still alive. Several times in the long years after his death, she expressed in different ways her dream: ‘My idea of heaven is a world without Claire.’ But ...”

“... called them in 1814) all made the same move, whether from conviction, pragmatism, or both. Robert Southey, whose incendiary drama Wat Tyler (1794) had been too hot for even the most reckless publisher to touch at the height of the revolution panic, was now cheerfully knocking out loyal odes in his role as poet laureate. Southey was consistent, as ...”

“... rhyme, can hope to convey both their individual voices and their collective charm. It is here that Robert Kehew’s anthology, Lark in the Morning, succeeds so brilliantly. Kehew’s bilingual edition includes 28 poets and 55 songs, extending from the ‘First Troubadour’, Guillem de Peiteus (1071-1127, but see the cautions above), to the last, Guiraut ...”

“... disappeared as it has been surrounded and overlaid by successive Chinese visions of the modern. Robert Barnett’s experience of Lhasa does not go back as far as the Dalai Lama’s memory: he first visited in 1987, as a tourist on a not very profound search for enlightenment. He never got to the cave where he had planned a week of meditation. Instead, on ...”

“... and the names of banned writers listed (739 Jewish writers who wrote in French were included by May 1943). Some publishing houses were requisitioned (including Hachette), others were closed, while some newspaper editors were dismissed (Jean Prouvost of Paris-Soir was one). Other periodicals met with German approval and were given preferential treatment or ...”

“... Robert Ferguson’s title has already been used at least twice for Viking-related works, which makes one wonder about his subtitle: what’s ‘new’ in Viking studies? The history of the Vikings has been well known, in outline, for a long time. By early medieval standards, we have very good documentation for it, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Frankish and Irish annals, with further contributions from Arab and Byzantine sources, while the Icelanders’ passion for sagas and poems means that we also have versions of the Vikings’ side of the story ...”

“... its stage properties ‘an old Mohammed’s head’ which was probably used in the temple scene of Robert Greene’s comedy Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1590) and the conversion scene in Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1612), a play dramatising the life of the renegade English pirate John Ward. The difference ...”

“... that some of the first and fiercest episodes in the Indian Mutiny played themselves out. On 11 May, rebelling sepoys of the Bengal Army crossed the River Jumna and called on the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah to serve as their protector. Next, they turned their attention to the British civilians who clustered in the area around the church, slaughtering the ...”

“... a Mutual Suicide Association, by the regulations whereof any member being weary of life, may call at any time upon another to cut his throat for him. It is all of course to be done very quietly without weeping or gnashing of teeth. I, for instance, am to go in and say, ‘I say, Hunt, just stop painting that head a minute, and cut my throat’; to ...”

“... turns out to be an important asset. Grey complained bitterly when his father took a peerage; Lord Robert Cecil (as he then was) thought, when his elder brother’s death made him the heir to the marquessate, that his political career had been marred. Both hated leaving the Commons for the Lords; both benefited from the move. Salisbury would not have made a ...”

“... family, part of the middling ranks of 18th-century society, the education of the young Thomas Robert, his friends and the development of his ideas till in 1805 he was an established figure, the author of the famous Essay on Population (by then in the sophisticated form of the later editions), a rector of the Church of England, professor at the new East ...”

“... third, there is an infinite number of gradations.’ The new edition, which has an introduction by Robert Macfarlane, has an illustrated gate-post cover showing a variety of pebbles: a piece of amber from the Suffolk coast, a fragment of jet from the Yorkshire coast near Whitby. Nothing is static about a shoreline. Ancient glaciers made and carried colossal ...”

“... likely to make successful prosecution a cinch; Maryland, where the death penalty was suspended in May, couldn’t compete. But in any case, there’s a strong sense that it’s all over bar the date of execution. Very possibly that’s all people are interested in. The support of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence did not make much difference to ...”

“... in Benghazi against Ansar al-Sharia – the group accused of the attack on the US Consulate – may seem to offer hope, but it will take a lot more than one popular protest against one Islamist militia to rescue Libya from this catastrophic condition. Obama made a calamitous wrong call in endorsing the Nato intervention in March 2011. His defence secretary ...”

“... act and to be responsible for their actions is an essential aspect of who they are), and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) leading the yeses (he’s just had a difficult encounter with the mother of a young man they accidentally killed in a preceding film). Both are reasonable positions, and we may, according to our own ...”