“... least – the General’s grandson. The most remarkable case, though, is that of the press tycoon, Robert Hersant – the third richest man in France. Hersant’s Vichyite and anti-semitic past does not make him an attractive candidate: the last time he stood in a parliamentary election in one of the safest conservative seats in France, he was roundly ...”

“... the rain. Unfair that we neither know nor care that the author of ‘O Worship the King’ was Robert Grant (1785-1838). Grant’s virtual anonymity is the clearest proof that he has entered into the folk-memory, his verses remembered or half-remembered by those who neither know nor care – nor need they – what it is they remember. And who can ...”

“... done by honest men. With us, you only kill for reasons of state.’ This is the opinion of Maurice Robert, research director of the French secret service (and later Ambassador to Gabon), as recorded by Faligot and Krop in their excellent and well-researched book. It is difficult to accept such a verdict on the DGSE (originally the BCRA, then the DGER, then the ...”

“... by more than half the 35 contributors, few of whom bother to make it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy ...”

“... of illness. She grew up in Milwaukee, where her maternal grandfather owned a department store (Robert Kanigel describes him as ‘a force in the local Jewish community and a major philanthropist’). Her mother thought the Californian climate would help Marian recover from Spanish flu – and also wanted to enrol at the university herself. Marian’s ...”

“... Little Review, serialised the novel.) Bryher financially supported her lover H.D. and her husband Robert McAlmon, who published Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway. There is also the suggestion, never quite substantiated by Souhami, that the way these women lived, their promiscuity and outsized influence, could itself be considered uniquely ...”

“... here – as are the movies and documentaries, with Albert Finney following Richard Burton and Robert Hardy as a screen Churchill. As for approval ratings, in an admittedly contrived phone-poll BBC2 viewers last November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a ...”

“... outlast the Obama presidency, and if it does the largest single reason will be Obama’s choice of Robert Gates as secretary of defence. Gates worked under William Casey, the director of the CIA at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal. His nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was thwarted by suspicions of his complicity in covert operations in ...”

“... faulty passages, but I know of no poet in any language who has written so much that is good,’ Robert Southey wrote (the declaration is emblazoned on the dust-jacket of Juliet Barker’s new Life). Yet any sense of this – of the subtle, elementary qualities of Wordsworth’s verse – is rarely apparent to those who study him, and rarely apparent in the ...”

“... At the very end of The Ring and the Book Browning delivers one of the most staggering mule-kicks ever meted out by an author to his readers. Bear in mind that the poem is more than 21,000 lines of blank verse – about twice the length of Paradise Lost. It was published in four monthly instalments, each containing three books of the poem, which appeared from November 1868 to February 1869 ...”

“... driven them into the arms of the deep state, whose prevaricating representatives – in particular Robert Mueller, who before being appointed as special investigator into alleged Trump-Russia collusion was the longest-serving director of the FBI since J. Edgar Hoover – have been transformed by the mainstream media into paragons of integrity. Why these people ...”

“... made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it is better than prose. Another ...”

“... who came to Wimpole Street in 1844, was privy to her mistress’s clandestine love affair with Robert Browning (and was one of only two witnesses to her marriage) and accompanied her to Italy with a bravery which Elizabeth Barrett Browning acknowledged in the very last words of her last letter to Browning on the eve of their elopement. ‘Wilson has been ...”

“... initially as sure-footed and commanding as the self-serving and misleading account by his brother Robert suggests. Kennedy’s dramatic televised announcement of the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba was ‘designed to divert attention from his private belief (and that of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara) that the ...”

“... proposals. Her great love, Henry Harvey, featured in her own and other novels, including one by Robert Liddell (‘Jockie’), who was a colleague in the British Council. Although she necessarily draws a good deal on the source of these matters, the collection of Pym letters and diaries, A Very Private Eye, which she coedited with Barbara’s sister, Hazel ...”