“... are sown in the national and provincial press during the run-up to publication day. With luck, Robert Robinson or a lesser TV person will be recruited to do a celebratory book programme. In addition to the traditional newspaper, shop-window and point-of-sale displays there will also be extensive coverage on commercial radio. This ...”

“... of Keynes’s birth in 1883 has come and gone. Last year saw the opportune publication of Robert Skidelsky’s much-heralded new biography – or at least of its first volume, which does not get further than 1920. It is a formidable work, designed to out-Harrod Harrod, which will be an unparalleled source for those interested in the rise of the junior ...”

“... in control of himself and his circumstances. How far this is from the agonising into print of a Robert Lowell or a John Berryman is too obvious to need spelling out: but the expectations of dishevelled intimacy aroused in Lowell’s readers, or in Berryman’s, are what Tomlinson the Englishman cannot help but disappoint. We are not to be intimate with ...”

“... a Kessing’s Archive entry: ‘it inflicted disaster and destruction on the city,’ we are told. Robert McCrum’s first thriller was unusually well received. Follow-ups are notoriously hazardous, but he will not lose many readers with this second effort. The hero of A Loss of Heart is a 30-year-old Polytechnic lecturer. (McCrum, like Ackroyd, has an Auberon ...”

“... Not while Rupert’s still around. And while Rupert’s still around (and Sir James, and Robert, and Tiny – and maybe even Victor: ‘I have the papers in which to give my views, but I think the House of Lords will be better’), reports of the ‘death of the press barons’ are somewhat exaggerated. The British certainly like to give the ...”

“... difficult terrains in any case) than there appeared in 1978 The Older Hardy, the second volume of Robert Gittings’s biography, which had the effect of vindicating, exhaustively and unforgivingly, Edward Clodd’s epitaph. Ever since, the Trade Union has been on the defensive. The first move was to prefer to Gittings’s biography a later one by Michael ...”

“... with a never-failing air of disinterested benevolence, and in the sacred name of friendship. Robert Southey, Sam’s great friend, Sara’s brother-in-law, another promising young man in the media, had already rumbled the Wordsworths. ‘Wordsworth and his sister,’ he was later to observe ‘who pride themselves on having no selfishness, are of all ...”

“... movie, which is full of stock English types, one of them lazily played by the American sex-object, Robert Redford. He should have taken lessons in the British accent from the hard-working Marlon Brando. Firmly hooked to the movie, this elaborate Century edition of Out of Africa is packed with illustrations which will appeal to nostalgic movie-weepers but have ...”

“... Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all through friends and ...”

“... or imaginative domain. The Irish Dissenter John Toland fellow-travelled with pantheism, while Robert Clayton, a colleague of Berkeley, was convinced that Nature was secretly spirit. Even the great 19th-century Irish scientist John Tyndall, who discovered the reason the sky is blue, believed that matter was essentially mystical and transcendental. There is ...”

“... ideology as Australia is likely to have – and Murdoch has done his bit in furthering it. He and Robert Stigwood financed Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981), which stands in this tradition. A ‘radical’ rhetoric armed Murdoch for his invasion of the United States. In what McKnight calls a ‘deep political transformation’, America and a ...”

“... literature collected in Russia since the 1600s. A team of Anglo-American translators headed by Robert Chandler has now produced a collection of folktales superior to many of its Russian counterparts. Aiming to strike a balance between readability and completeness, Chandler has tried to represent nearly all of the major figures involved with the gathering ...”

“... had clapped him in jail. Frank argues that Defoe’s novel is primarily based on the career of Robert Knox, a 19-year-old seaman whose ship was badly damaged off the coast of India in 1659. He and his crew put ashore in Dutch-occupied Ceylon, where they were welcomed by the Tamil people but feared as imperial interlopers by the king of Kandy, a region in ...”

“... consisted of one chief clerk, seven subordinate clerks and a messenger. The US minister to France, Robert Livingston, had no staff.When Trump moves into the White House on 20 January, he will take charge of around 2.8 million non-military federal employees working in hundreds of departments and agencies sprawled throughout the Beltway and beyond. Trump gets to ...”

“... mother also made a somewhat pitiable fuss of her Virginia roots and claimed to be descended from Robert E. Lee. When her marriage began to fall apart, she made it her mission to educate Allen and his brothers in the details of her family history, taking them repeatedly on visits to ancestral sites and introducing them to ancient relatives. On one ...”