“... 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 ...”

“... but rather with the alleged critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several ...”

“... documents from the very end of the tsarist period which tells the story of Nicholas’s last days. Robert Massie’s The Romanovs: The Final Chapter tells what happened to the Romanovs after they died. Massie’s book is a movie, big on atmosphere and set pieces, while Steinberg and Khrustalev’s book is a book, as dense with information as an old ...”

“... would do well not to ask any questions about motivation. On Carla’s Song, he gave the actor Robert Carlyle a run-down of his character. ‘Your name’s George and you drive a bus. Maybe it would be a good idea if you learned to drive a bus.’ Had Loach stuck with theatre directing – an early pursuit – he would by now be bringing his plays to ...”

“... has been for more than a century, politically impotent and irrelevant. Simon Heffer and the late Robert Rhodes James have thought differently, and rightly so. Recent indignation over the ‘co-option’ of royal events by Tony Blair highlights the uses to which politicians can put the monarchy; it is hard to see why Prime Ministers would continue the ritual ...”

“... nibbled at by the sharp tooth of development. But it still just about holds. In Sprawl, Robert Bruegmann bids those of us who cherish the division between city and countryside to take stock and review our values. Everywhere, the arbitrary containment of communities is dead or dying, he argues. Where it is maintained, it is only at a cost and by a ...”

“... like the hapless charioteer in the terrifying simile that closes the first book of the Georgics. Robert Fagles comes to the task of translating the Aeneid with a lifetime of experience as a translator behind him, but the Aeneid is the first Latin text he has translated.* Until now he has worked on Greek texts, and is particularly admired for his translations ...”

“... books supplement left a tempting gap. With his then wife, Barbara, and an editor at Harper’s, Robert Silvers, plus Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, Epstein launched the New York Review of Books. Like Anchor Books (and everything Epstein has invested himself in), the New York Review made a conscious ...”

“... cleansing’, with its suggestion that nothing more than a routine housekeeping task is involved. Robert Bevan begins his book with an account of his childhood obsession with photographs and film footage of the destruction of Europe’s built heritage in World War Two, an obsession that ‘felt wrong’ in relation to the ‘greater evil’ also available for ...”

“... to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy derived from the paternal authority that Adam and subsequent biblical fathers exercised over their families and servants.More recently, scholars have slightly qualified Laslett’s findings, pushing the ...”

“... 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 ...”