“... most obvious of which is the absence of any sympathetic Jewish characters. The editor of Quadrant, Robert Manne, summed it up when he said that the novel appeared to be set in a contemporary Queensland that was somehow equipped with concentration camps. Yet the book’s flaws in a way worked to Demidenko’s advantage, because of the allowances we’re ...”

“... political behaviour, irrespective of changing ideology and institutions. Stalin’s biographer Robert Tucker was keen on the resemblance between Stalin and the most bloodthirsty of the 16th-century tsars, Ivan the Terrible, noting in Stalin in Power that Stalin, too, saw a resemblance, as witness his emotional response to Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible ...”

“... tune of about £650,000. Between Agnew’s place and Sandringham is Houghton Hall, family seat of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess ...”

“... in a Ship, as well as in the State’). A good woman was ‘like a ship’, the preacher Robert Wilkinson ventured, because ‘her countenance and conversation are ballasted with soberness and gravity’ – though she ‘must not have one quality of a ship, and that is too much rigging’.Beneath the bluster, however, was hard-nosed calculation. A ...”

“... is limited and it is hardly a complaint to say that some significant details could be added. A Mr Harris, for instance, about whom nothing is known save that he married the daughter of a British consul in Naples, is included, and it could have been mentioned that for want of an Anglican clergyman the ceremony was conducted by none other than the great German ...”

“... the usual upright, and excruciatingly painful, position. One of the most memorable passages in Robert Harris’s new novel, Imperium, describes the famous crucifixion of the six thousand slave comrades of the rebel Spartacus, who had been rounded up by the Romans in 71 BC. Harris imagines the victorious Roman ...”

“... to read the poems. One anecdote that Parker does not pass on to us concerns a meeting with Frank Harris, in which Housman took offence at Harris’s suggestion that the final stanza of ‘1887’, the introductory poem of A Shropshire Lad, was darkly intended. The poem remembers the Silver Jubilee celebrations, and Housman ...”

“... drew a decidedly crisp letter from Lady Mosley, who called it ‘fanciful in the extreme’. As Robert Skidelsky said of the meeting in his Oswald Moslev: ‘The number of future memoir writers and Labour politicians in the audience alone ensured that it would be talked about for years to come.’ There were also a hundred angry busmen present, out for ...”

“... Powell grew up amid the ‘hop poles, oasts and orchards’ of the Kent countryside, as Alexandra Harris writes in her contribution to the collection. In A Canterbury Tale, he used the landscape to show an unchanging pastoral England. But since the film was scripted by Pressburger, an exile who knew the unrelenting force of modernity, it becomes ‘an act of ...”

“... activism from ‘the frontline’ in Brixton. ‘Five Nights of Bleeding’ was dedicated to Leroy Harris, a young Black man stabbed at a party in South London:night number one was in BRIXTON:SOFRANO B sound systemwas a beating out a rhythm with a firecoming down his reggae reggae wire.it was a sound shaking down your spinal column,a bad music tearing up your ...”

“... vote. Three essays provide insights into the changing social basis of Conservative support. Robert Waller’s position as research director for the Harris opinion poll has given him access to the surveys undertaken for the Conservative Party over the last thirty years. Here, simultaneously, is evidence of who voted ...”

“... appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and ...”

“... And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in pretending to help people ...”

“... says, in ‘a race to the bottom driven by ever-receding profitability’. The Nazi politician Robert Ley said that ‘there is no longer such a thing as a private individual.’ Half a century after Ley’s suicide at Nuremberg, Morgan, as editor of the News of the World, ensured that this was the case in Britain. Every parasite has its parasite. Every ...”

“... as Collier and Fielding put it; while Harriet Smith’s painful awareness that her suitor Robert Martin hasn’t read the right sort of books (‘I believe he has read a good deal – but not what you would think any thing of,’ she admits to Emma) shows the snobbery behind superficial learning. What the Cry – and by extension polite society at ...”