“... were ‘the heirs of Swift, Berkeley and Grattan’. Not quite: he cited Burke, Grattan, Swift, Robert Emmet and Parnell, but not Berkeley. On Mahaffy: it may be that McDowell, who joined with W.B. Stanford to write the life of Mahaffy, has tired of the man, but the account of him in the present book makes him appear tawdry and obvious. His views on the ...”

“... Sun. (At least this was Rowland’s version of what was happening – Murdoch has denied it.) Robert Maxwell is trying to buy a 10 per cent share in Fleet Holdings from the, Australian tycoon Robert Holmes a Court for £15.4 million, while another bidder – it’s not clear whether or not he is a rival to Maxwell ...”

“... worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and ...”

“... have no idea what it contains. In the 17th century, it was in the possession of the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly ...”

“... the conflict as simply a war for Southern independence, and celebrate the grandeur of its heroes. Robert E. Lee was an Olympian figure, always described as ‘magnificent’ by English visitors, and Stonewall Jackson was a martyr – to what it was not clear. Jackson’s death evoked an outpouring of sympathy and admiration from the entire British ...”

“... put their crosses just where they were going to put them anyway. But some recent research by Robert Goodin and James Mahmud Rice suggests that something more complicated might be going on.* The polls, they reveal, don’t fluctuate in the run-up to an election because respondents are simply humouring the pollsters with the pretence that their opinions ...”

“... has been quoted again and again since 11 September, including by George Bush, Tony Blair, Iain Duncan-Smith and an endless string of journalists: ‘Whoever kills a soul is like one who has killed the whole of Mankind.’ This sentence is at the heart of the Politically Correct campaign to ensure that the war fever against Islamic terrorists doesn’t lead ...”

“... gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend ...”

“... Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding ...”

“... been more at home with nationalism, imperialism and even racialism. Scholars from Uday S. Mehta to Duncan Bell have demonstrated that 19th-century liberal prescriptions about freedom and progress, emerging in an age of imperial expansion and capitalist globalisation, presupposed a chasm between civilised whites and uncivilised non-whites. Victorian liberals ...”

“... in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems … She wrote some great things – saw strangely – makes one shudder with new truths – but ever and again one ...”

“... monkeys, the poor little monkeys!” – his nickname for Gracie and Katie. In the next room Robert was sitting with a book open pretending to read.’ All those ailments from a different era: ulceration of the retina, internal inflammation, sick headaches, Valentine’s Meat Juice as a remedy for Edward’s abscess on his tooth, the typhoid that left ...”

“... the way stories are told about saints and prophets, or holy kings in Shakespeare – kings like Duncan and Edward the Confessor in Macbeth, Lincoln’s favourite play. Vidal’s novel is largely about the way in which Lincoln became an image of ‘greatness’ to his people. Among British readers of this patriotic American book the most fortunate will be ...”

“... tradition alike (with more than a hundred pages of endnotes citing work by the likes of Tom Nairn, Robert Crawford and Brian Doyle), this is an examination of the writing produced across these islands during the crucial century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at last legally ...”

“... in order to offset the desiccating effect of the documentary record. Katherine Duncan-Jones describes a bit of a shark in Ungentle Shakespeare (2001), and is very good at extracting plausible matter even from Aubrey’s anecdotes. She also adds lively and often credible dashes of speculation of her own, such as the suggestion that ...”