“... collector of Abstract Expressionism, a friend of Philip Guston, and a correspondent of Robert Motherwell. He had already bought Hartigan’s August Harvest, which she had painted in Long Island the previous summer. He was interesting, and interested. He knew Hartigan’s world, but was not of it. He needed as much space and time to work as she ...”

“... have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi. It’s not ...”

“... endorsement, 96-3. But between these smooth confirmations two brutal confirmation battles – for Robert Bork, rejected by the Senate in 1987, and for Clarence Thomas, narrowly confirmed in 1991 – presaged the hyper-polarisation of the present-day confirmation process.Bork and Thomas, like Scalia, espoused originalism, a reactionary trend in American ...”

“... so fruitfully explored in Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999), an account of Robert Louis Stevenson’s immediate ancestors and their pioneering contribution to lighthouse design around Britain and beyond.There is a pervading vagueness about Dora’s free-associating meditations. The word ‘liminal’ is tested to destruction, appearing ...”

“... as Steichen’s was also part of its undoing. Stange puts the work of the Swiss photographer Robert Frank at the end, and outside the narrative, of her story. He started on the travels which resulted in his bleak, grainy picture essay in book form, The Americans, in the late Fifties, at about the time ‘The Family of Man’ was touring the world. Now ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... perfumier, linen-trader, timber-merchant etc etc, and his extensive espionage work on behalf of Robert Harley, Defoe was an indefatigable writer. Peter Earle, in the introduction to The World of Defoe (1976), confesses the alarm he experienced when ‘with the contract signed, I began to realise just what I had let myself in for ... To my horror I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... examples of this self-serving tendency, while supplying plenty from the 18th century. Sir Robert Walpole, effective prime minister from 1722 to 1742, was both joyously corrupt and a ruthless exponent of one-party government, yet he seems genuinely to have believed that all expressions of hostility to his protracted regime stemmed not from a sense of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which prompts a snort of derision from Chomsky, who takes a side-swipe at an earlier attempt by Robert Tucker to define ‘America’s historic purpose’. The complacency underpinning The Imperial Temptation is, however, abandoned when the authors conduct their Gulf War autopsy. President Bush’s decision to pursue the military option, and his subsequent ...”

“... Spitz,3 purports to supersede all previous efforts; Spitz is especially hostile to insiders like Robert Shelton:4 he himself has abjured the co-operation he knew he would not get and parades his high-mindedness in the preface. According to Spitz, Dylan has been ‘protected by literary sycophants’ right from the start: Spitz engages with Shelton’s New ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Washington, the State Department could be forgiven for shuddering at its findings. Its author Robert Gersony spent three months talking to Mozambican refugees in five Southern African countries. He collected eye-witness accounts of full-scale attacks, murders, beatings and mutilations inflicted by Renamo. His detailed findings challenge the view that ...”