“... no British novels that, like Catch 22, approach war as lunacy made real, or implicitly ask, like Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, why running dope is worse than killing unarmed Vietnamese. Such a mixture of the macabre and the grotesque with a touch of anarchy is not a British vein. There are extraordinary figures in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour ...”

“... when the orthodox refuted and denounced them. Only in the present generation have historians like Robert Mandrou and Peter Burke seriously attempted to ascertain what was going on beneath the surface. In Montaillou Le Roy Ladurie utilised one lucky cache of evidence. Professor Ginzburg has found another. Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, lived from 1532 ...”

“... the person who understands politics is not Burke, who is for Wills just one more theorist, but Sir Robert Peel. So now the true conservatives are, on Wills’s view, not the theorists of the National Review, but those who settle for less and accept the system. It is Bagehot whom Wills quotes with most approval. What is mistaken in all this? It is significant ...”

“... In 1949 when a panel of his fellow poets (including T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden and Allen Tate) awarded Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos there was an immediate and angry public debate. The reaction is not surprising and might have been worse had the texts of Pound’s wartime broadcasts over Rome Radio been publicly available ...”

“... as avant-garde – that is, as critical if not transgressive. Yet was he? His first biographer, Robert Lebel, called him a ‘born contrarian’, which is weak tea. A bit stronger was the judgment of the painter Robert Motherwell – whose anthology The Dada Painters and Poets (1951) helped to recover such figures for the ...”

“... institute in the world, the Sloan-Kettering in New York, under the patronage of its Director, Dr Robert A. Good. Summerlin claimed that by a short period of cultivation in vitro a skin graft would be so altered as to make it transplantable from one mouse to another mouse of a different strain, and that even a graft into a member of a different species would ...”

“... of the administrative and political efficiency of their respective states. The work of Winter, Robert and their collaborators examines how they dealt with the problems of employment, welfare, food and fuel supply, housing and public health, in an effort to estimate the degree of satisfaction which they were able to maintain among their ...”

“... two hundred years ago this year, An Essay on the Principle of Population made the Rev. Thomas Robert malthus into the man of the moment. Malthus’s principle – that population inevitably outruns food resources – was heralded by some as the decisive scientific refutation of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English ...”

“... terrible vision in On Trust for the Nation). The central character is a composite caricature (part Robert Maxwell, part Mohamed al-Fayed). The story is as old as the hills (love, betrayal, the search for happiness). The plot structure is both obvious and predictable (a three-parter, with the requisite climaxes and crises), the themes comforting and familiar ...”

“... disintegrated, no longer preparing for government, but for oblivion. Part of the SDP is to go with Robert MacLennan, a year ago unknown in Britain and today unknown throughout the world. The other part, under David Owen, is being re-launched as the political wing of Sainsbury’s. At the Labour Conference there was little rejoicing over the demise of the ...”

“... head that Clarissa scribbles and Molly Bloom muses. For many male novelists, like the Austrian Robert Musil, erotic self-metamorphosis becomes mystical, a kind of religious substitute. The sphinx has her mystery, but in the final and most subtle analysis it is that of having no secret at all. One of Musil’s most memorable passages, a kind of essay ...”

“... of arms to the Iranians from 1985 onwards, of the ludicrously misconceived mission to Tehran by Robert McFarlane in May 1986, and of the use to which the profits of the sales were put, have been the subject of inquiries by the combined Senate and House Select Committee. The major questions were whether the President knew of the diversion of funds from the ...”

“... been faced, with such a choice? In 1917 or thereabouts, Siegfried Sassoon confided to his friend Robert Graves that he was planning to ‘go public’, as a decorated front-line officer, with what he knew about real conditions on the Western Front. Graves had him put away for ‘shell-shock’, for his own good. That was certainly a betrayal of a friend ...”

“... agenda as by ignorant voyeurs? Against such an opera buffa background of claim and counter-claim, Robert Pollack’s Signs of Life is as inspiring for its original insights as it is unexpected: a real molecular geneticist, with more than his 15 minutes of fame as a respected researcher into viruses and cancer, has composed a convincing and agreeably lyrical ...”

“... regarded this as its best effort was widely thought to be embarrassing. As the movie’s director Robert Zemeckis gave his speech of acceptance (which he did, excruciatingly, by speaking ‘on behalf of Forrest Gumps everywhere’), the girl seated next to Madonna, in the words of my colleague Frank DiGiacomo, ‘turned to the pop star and displayed the ...”