“... that the British state, of which it was a part, was one of the main protagonists in the conflict? Robert Savage believes that the corporation passed this test with honour: ‘the BBC was attacked, threatened and bullied by a variety of actors, but did its best to stand its ground and maintain editorial independence and journalistic integrity.’ But the facts ...”

“... What​ you can paint depends on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not under any circumstances permitted to sit in the orchestre. And they could only sit in the parterre, or rear stalls, if accompanied by a man ...”

“... on Grub Street without ever being seen by a soul, subsisting on gruel, salad and weak beer. She may have been intrigued by his unusual longevity. In 1646, perhaps feeling her own years, Jeffreys laid out 14d for Leonard Lessius’s Hygiasticon: Or, The right course of preserving Life and Health unto extream old Age. A much larger expense was clothing: early ...”

“... Northern counterparts, if not as the forebears of a European modernity that was still in embryo as Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox. More troublingly, the compatibility of slavery with these ‘conjectures of order’ raises questions about the integrity both of American history and of the modern world that O’Brien’s Southerners imperfectly ...”

“... will now answer the ultimate moral question: what, finally, do we live by? And though the answer may come only in sporadic flashes known as epiphanies, heard between two waves, in the ominous echo of an Indian cave, in the moment in the rose garden or in a sudden shout in the street, it can scarcely be claimed by the more conventionally religious that the ...”

“... with Ben Jonson, the source of the title, whom Lake eventually gets to, rather like the dragon in Robert Graves’s poem. Jonson had the most turbulent, up and down existence of any of Britain’s greatest writers. It’s just possible that he was the son, born posthumously, of a radically alienated Puritan preacher, ...”

“... with the top frogs in the entertainment industry. But there’s no way of checking on that.) They may both be green and imaginary, but apart from that the two frogs are very different. The frog-as-prince is the embodiment of a profoundly anti-frog message: to be a frog is to be punished, to be sentenced to a season in purgatory. As with most fairy ...”

“... noir I hadn’t seen before, where the ruthless, calculating woman, in the shape of Jane Greer, may also really care for the man she is framing and using, a very young Robert Mitchum. This complexity is not going to do her any good, because both the plot and Mitchum believe in the simpler story of her murderous guile. But ...”

“... any director with two expensive stars on his hands. Remember Michael Mann’s thriller Heat, where Robert de Niro and Al Pacino get together for a totally inconsequential conversation just so we can see them together before they return to their posts on opposite sides of the law. The stars have to share serious screen time, even if the plot stagnates for a ...”

“... by French scholars between 1920 and 1970, at Prehistomania at the Musée de l’Homme (until 20 May).Paris has seen a lot of ‘prehistomania’ in recent years. In 2018, the Musée de l’Homme put on a popular Neanderthal exhibition. The following year, at the Centre Pompidou, Prehistory: A Modern Enigma considered 19th and 20th-century artistic responses ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”

“... and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert Alter, and it has arrived accompanied by a joyful noise, widely acclaimed in the press as the Psalms for Our Time. New translations of a classic text are either done as a criticism of the old translations (correcting mistakes, finding an equivalent that is ...”

“... two new English translations, one by Robin Kirkpatrick, the other by the husband and wife team of Robert and Jean Hollander, should be welcomed. Each edition is the final volume of a long labour, and each helps the reader see this last cantica in the context of the previous two. With Virgil as his guide, Dante has already spiralled down through hell, seen ...”

“... play Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Other actors had been mentioned, including Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum and Sinatra. But Coppola held out; he shot a test in which Marlon made himself up as the old don, and set about finding a creaking, breathless voice for him. Then, in a trice, there was Brando, enthroned for that first scene, with a kitten in his ...”

“... Robert Kolker​ didn’t find the Galvins: they found him. They wanted him – journalist, friend of a friend – to write a book about their family because they ‘believed their story had something that could be of comfort to other people who are suffering’. I can’t quite work out why. If your child starts hearing voices and seeing things that aren’t there, or believes they’re dead, or you’re dead, replaced by an impostor, and nothing can persuade them otherwise, the book you want is Elyn Saks’s autobiography, The Centre Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness (2007 ...”