“... Abbey, where, ‘if you look very closely’, you will see the name of Governor George Augustus Robinson, officially ‘Chief Protector of the Aborigines’ in Tasmania, described as their ‘Pacificator’. If you have to look ‘very closely’ it can’t be all that prominent in modern British life. But for Lawson, the Tasmanian issue still lies at the ...”

“... lampshade?’ Here and in his more gnomic utterances (‘We are watching some dreary music by Michael Tippett and Daddy keeps saying: “When does the shooting start?”’) Fitzgerald also surely owed something to E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady appeared in Time and Tide in the 1930s and whose ‘Robert’ is similarly laconic, impassive ...”

“... is the latest in a long line of works about Sappho by women writers. An early example is Mary Robinson’s breathless sonnet sequence, Sappho and Phaon (1796). Robinson aspires to the Longinian Sublime; sadly, her writing sounds like this: In vain you fly me! on the madd’ning main SAPPHO shall haunt thee ‘mid the ...”

“... orthodoxy (it is made by last year’s Nobel laureates in economics, Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson, in their book Why Nations Fail). But less so than a few decades ago; it has for some time been under siege. Mariana Mazzucato points out in The Entrepreneurial State (2011) that many of the most important recent technologies – including the ...”

“... there was no lecture about the Famine, the Fenians, Young Ireland, the 1916 Rising. Even poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had ...”

“... John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might distract attention from the proper Parliamentary forum, the floor of the House. On their view, this would damage the position of individual members and of Parliament ...”

“... got a hairdressing apprenticeship but was sacked after a few weeks for bunking off to go to a Tom Robinson gig. Boy George deliberately missed all his exams and then refused to join his father’s building firm (‘I painted and decorated myself instead’). In those days, ‘flamboyance and glamour,’ as the artist Nicola Tyson puts it, ‘were under ...”

“... manuscripts to do with the Society, were edited by Mary Thale and published twenty years ago. Now Michael Davis has collected and edited all the many publications of the LCS. They fill four large volumes, to which Davis has added a volume of contemporary pamphlets, mainly by its supporters, and a further volume of Parliamentary debates and Government reports ...”

“... of In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life and Times of Michael K (1983), to the confessional monologue of Age of Iron (1990) and the literary-historical pastiches of Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1994), Coetzee’s approach has been varied, his idiom pliable. He has written in the voice of a repressed ...”

“... broken-down sad ship’ on which four years earlier Dr Crippen and his mistress (‘Mr and Master Robinson’) had been apprehended. He regarded the war as one between sisters, ‘between Martha and Mary, the efficient and intolerant against the casual and sympathetic’, and hoped that the effect of the outcome, whatever it might be, would be to make ...”

“... want me to be a realist,’ Coetzee complained while writing Foe, his reworking of Robinson Crusoe. ‘They want my books to be-about. Specifically, to be-about South Africa.’ And sure enough, when Foe was published, one reviewer accused him of indulging in ‘postmodern games while Soweto burns’. Everett has said that his second ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the newspapers attacked the influx of Jews, others also came to their defence, most notably Michael Davitt, the leader of the Land League. ‘The Jews have never to my knowledge done any injury to Ireland,’ he wrote in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal in 1893. ‘Like our own race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”