“... this persuasion she did nothing to controvert – so that when her ardent admirer and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not ...”

“... by the exiled Madame de Staël, that it was this street that she missed most of all – whilst Robert Brasillach lived in the more elongated ugliness of the Rue Lecourbe, not far removed. But when they were in Spain, at the time of the Civil War, they were on different sides, and the books they wrote about the war were in sharp contrast one to the ...”

“... as Raymond Bonner puts it in this important book. Alerted that the United States Ambassador, Robert White, would make a significant statement, they crowded round the entrance. ‘I believe reports that a group of approximately a hundred men landed from Nicaragua about 4 p.m. yesterday,’ Mr White told them as he emerged from a meeting with the ruling ...”

“... the past by Harold Macmillan and is protected now by the enthusiasm of men such as Roy Jenkins and Robert Rhodes James. But why should those of us who are excluded from this desirable club at Westminster want such an extended work of collective biography? In the case of these volumes one obvious reason lies in the period that they cover. They begin one year ...”

“... Robert Friedman’s Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America came out in 2000. Two years before that, in June 1998, he received a phone call from Mike McCall, an FBI agent. McCall warned him that his investigation into Russian organised crime was proving dangerous. ‘I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings,’ McCall said, ‘but a major Russian organised crime figure has taken out a contract on your life ...”

“... essentially eventless waiting-to-be-a-writer. Fleming’s life was not like that. His grandfather Robert was a Dundee book-keeper who left school at 13 and went on to become a fabulously rich man by more or less inventing the investment trust, the first of the pooled investments which now dominate the financial world. ...”

“... without the intervention of experiments that might show such a theory to be highly presumptuous, Robert Laughlin cautions against searching ‘on smaller and smaller scales for meaning that is not there’. Laughlin’s central argument is that instead of becoming obsessed with ultimate theories we would do better to focus on those properties of matter that ...”

“... his American heroes – including not only Lubitsch, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles, but also Robert, Aldrich, Frank Tashlin, Robert Wise and Nicholas Ray. Characteristically, his best remarks about them home in on technique. ‘Hitchcock’s mastery of the are grows greater with each film and he constantly needs to ...”

“... only six years ago; and ‘thick and fast they come at last,’ like Lewis Carroll’s oysters.) Robert Alter has not followed her example, but instead takes time to discuss the major works from the point of view of content, style, technique etc, when he reaches that point in Stendhal’s life at which they were written. This means that the chronological ...”

“... of Kafka’s art. Chief among these were the voices of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Marthe Robert and Erich Heller. Heller’s essay on The Castle in The Disinherited Mind (1952) marked a real turning point. He argued persuasively that it was folly to go on debating whether Kafka was religious or anti-religious, Marxist or bourgeois, Calvinist or ...”

“... Edward Thomas has sometimes been represented as a hack who turned into a thoroughbred when Robert Frost waved a magic wand. Neither part of this concept is quite true, as Andrew Motion shows. In the first place, Thomas was not a hack in any pejorative sense of the word. True, he worked hard when he did not feel like it at jobs he would not have chosen ...”

“... Caroline Blackwood’s first novel, was published when she was 44 and married to Robert Lowell. The seven years they spent together transformed her from an occasional magazine writer to a committed littérateur, a vindication of many years in the role of aristocratic playgirl, trophy wife and muse. She hailed from ‘the insular world of the ...”

“... interested in exploring this now apparently pivotal aspect of Anglo-Irish relations will find Robert Fisk’s book both absorbing and provocative. Subtitled ‘Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality’, it begins its main narrative in 1938, with a brief look back to 1921, when the British military authorities insisted on the retention of the ...”

“... and Tony Blair. In The Candidate, the great American film about political compromise starring Robert Redford, a young welfare lawyer is persuaded against his instinct to go into politics to change the world. He starts by answering questions with independent judgment and in direct language. Yes, he is in favour of abortion on demand. Yes, he is in favour ...”

“... Reagan’s difficulties in securing Senate approval for his nominee for the Supreme Court, Robert Bork. Few people have been honest enough to admit that they didn’t really know the answer to either question. After all, those who did know were either the clever market operators who escaped intact before the crash happened; or the Cassandras whose ...”