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“... 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 ...”

“... and depressions of two wars, she re-christened Moper. She referred to her menstrual periods as Robert. In the future some intuitive biographer might put forward a connection with the footman at Manderley whom she also called Robert. The fortunes of Moper, who at this stage had risen to be Major-General Sir Frederick ...”

“... in his final legacy; ignoring likewise the claims of later secretaries such as Peter Quennell and Robert Gathorne-Hardy, he bestowed the prize on the latest incumbent, the young John Russell. It was a bitter blow at the time to Connolly, who never found it easy to remain solvent, and who tended with an insouciance which has something rather admirable about it ...”

“... was ignored, seems to come up like a ghost at the feast throughout this remarkable book. Just as Robert Maxwell was officially declared unfit to run a public company before he was allowed to take over and rob the biggest printing company in the country, so Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland, before he and his company Lonrho were allowed to take over the Observer and ...”

“... in formal and stylistic terms. If the climate has now changed, it is due as much as to anyone to Robert Herbert, whose present book is long overdue. He has been teaching his revised view of Impressionism for a quarter of a century and his influence is widespread. In some ways, this is an old-fashioned book. Herbert steers clear of the machinery of ...”