“... object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his life reconstructing the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for ‘nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public’. When, in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Pamphlet against Anthologies charged the genre with reducing poetry to a ‘packet-commodity’, the only alternative that they proposed revealed just how inescapable the anthology had become. The ‘full Corpus’ that could drive anthologies ...”

“... ears, bit her, punched her in the face, and almost broke her legs by kicking her furiously.’Even Robert Lowell got carried away. In his long sonnet sequence ‘History’, he imagines one of Mary’s famous flights by night across Scotland on horseback as happening by car:We roared off hell-wheel and scattered the soft mob;happily only one man splashed the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were in there all the time and this really hurts us, too.’ Kristina was still thinking about Robert L. ‘I can’t believe I offered that man a drink. I’m an idiot.’ He looked pained. I said: ‘That’s actually what they told us to do earlier. Offer something to drink. It’s OK.’ It occurred to me that the question ‘Can I bring you something ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring ...”

“... a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off by a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed ...”

“... Paramount’s jitteriness about casting an unknown. The studio, which was also reluctant to cast Robert Duvall and Brando, wanted many actors more than they wanted Pacino. ‘They wanted Jack Nicholson. They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal.’ Imagine The Godfather with ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will ...”

“... In later life​, the worst thing you could call Robert Frost was ‘literary’. ‘If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better,’ he wrote to Wallace Stevens teasingly in 1935. ‘It is so we are saved from being literary … Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep and events ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... architectural policy of the next British monarch, as well as of the current mayor of Rome. Robert Stern, once a board member of the Disney Corporation, now dean of Yale’s School of Architecture and the author of the introduction to Krier’s latest book, is the architect of the presidential library of George W. Bush, now under construction in ...”