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“... struck between the Labour front bench and the then Viscount Cranborne, now Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, allowed 92 of the 759 ‘hereditaries’ to remain, on the understanding that they wouldn’t thwart the passage of legislation by their confrères. This arrangement, it was agreed, would remain until ‘stage two’ of the reforms. The ...”

“... To this Tebb and Vollum added more than two hundred other cases. The Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s mother, ‘subject to trance seizures’, was already half buried when the sexton filling the grave heard her screaming. Other of Tebb and Vollum’s great ladies were rescued by grave-robbers or (as in the Decameron) kindly necrophiliacs. Some ...”

“... Garry Winogrand, what could be done with ease and subtlety at home was harder to achieve abroad. Robert Frank worked in Britain between 1951 and 1953. Born in Switzerland but based in New York, he was still half-hoping his pictures would appeal to a magazine like Life but at the same time he was trying, as he wrote, to ‘break from the Traditional ...”

“... So Robert Kilroy-Silk, the fallen idol of daytime TV, has failed to win the backing of a majority of the United Kingdom Independence Party’s local chairmen in his bid to replace Roger Knapman as Ukip’s leader. The party’s highest-profile MEP isn’t going to let a ‘farcical’ straw poll stand in his way, however ...”

“... be reviewed in the LRB, is giving the first lecture, and he will be followed by, among others, Robert Crawford, Meg Bateman, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Billy Bragg and Sukhdev Sandhu. You might think the editorial staff of the Sun could learn a thing or two from attending some of the talks, until you have a look at Hold Ye Front Page, or its sequel, Hold Ye ...”

“... Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and the hugely entertaining and wrongly overlooked Robert Pinget. Beckett in particular, and later the very bankable Robbe-Grillet and Simon, seem never to have thought of being published by anyone else, even if it did mean their having to argue the toss over punctuation. There could be no more pleasant way of ...”

“... detailed allusions to this text or that. For a first role model Bayard brings on the librarian in Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities, who has charge of the three and a half million volumes in the imperial library of Kakania. He has never read a single one of them, never gone beyond the titles on the spines and the lists of contents at the front, on the ...”

“... her husbands (James Dougherty, Arthur Miller), her half-sister (Berniece Miracle), her stalkers (Robert Slatzer, James Haspiel), her saviours (Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett), her driver of one summer (Colin Clark), her coroner (Thomas Noguchi), to say nothing of half a dozen big novelists and enough conspiracy hacks to fill a jumbo jet. In some cases (usually ...”

“... A black man on a white horse shall chase the redskins away. It’s the dignity at Appomattox of Robert E. Lee Live from Phoenix on TV. That old white warrior John McCain gracefully concedes. Nobly gives the nation what it needs. A thousand years from now, you know it, This day will be remembered, poet. By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining ...”

“... public reaction to the book has centred too narrowly on its slighting references to ex-colleagues. Robert Harris’s furious depiction of it (in the Independent on Sunday) as spluttering with ‘rage, malice, contempt and hatred’ is probably the extreme case. The memoirs of other premiers, Harris notes, have shown saintly restraint towards erstwhile ...”

“... Sisman is not usually taken in, least of all by unsubstantiated assertions from Taylor himself. Robert Cole’s book, The Traitor within the Gates, forms an instructive contrast. In his treatment of several episodes, Cole has placed his reliance on the authority of the autobiography. For example, he simply reiterates its hard-luck tale of how Taylor’s ...”

“... He was the great man who was interested in great men. This could also be said of the modern poet Robert Lowell, a man of ‘tumbles and leaps’ and ‘manic crushes’ who was interested in the ‘great Boswell’ (so called by a Lady Lemon in 1792). At one point in the history of his elations and depressions Lowell was heard to speak of a trip to Scotland ...”

“... Extracts, or pericopes – to borrow his typically ornate term – from Robert Craft’s diary of his years with Stravinsky first appeared in the famous series of their conversation books issued throughout the Sixties. In 1972, after the composer’s death, a far bigger selection was published as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948-1971 ...”

“... version, but its colloquialism sometimes lapses jarringly, occasionally amusingly, into cliché. Robert Fagles’s new version of the Odyssey, on the other hand, is a classic modern Homer: elegant, natural and smooth. His solutions to the difficulties of rendition are always so neat that it is easy to forget there has been any effort made. Such easiness is a ...”

“... to re-impose the formal structures left behind them in their travels through space and time. Robert Lawson-Peebles’s word for this dialectic is ‘redcoatism’, after the practice of British regiments in the French and Indian War of lining up in bright scarlet uniforms only to get picked off by their assailants hiding behind trees. But the American ...”