“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or somebody – some murderer – like that. He had probably misread a communication from Robert (The Great Terror) Conquest. Anyway, it is already pretty clear that one of the chief excitements of this publication will be in finding out who has been dumped on, and how badly. Few well-known names escape the Larkin lash and although Anthony Thwaite ...”

“... he let me know that he didn’t appreciate my pun. The English, you see, have no sense of humour. Robert Lewis of St James’s Street, ‘the most beautiful cigar shop’, does not for all that escape a little mockery. ‘If the salesman feels you are truly worthy,’ says the magazine You, ‘you might be invited downstairs to the basement.’ ‘They also ...”

“... of their kind or jewels of their country. Many of them are American: Whitman, Stevens, Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Berryman, Cummings, and I suppose Auden. The English are Larkin and Betjeman. Russians and other foreigners include Pushkin, Blok, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, Canetti, Milosz and Popa. The only difference I see between ...”

“... British Sunday Times reporter. Yet the final result (largely written by McGovern’s speechwriter, Robert Schrum, who later went to work for Edward Kennedy) was at least as good as the speech made by President Carter in 1980, even though Carter’s chief speechwriter and other aides spent over two months preparing two series of drafts, an ‘A’ series for ...”

“... mass-produced goods sector using the Fordist assembly-line methods so horrifically described in Robert Linhart’s account of working for Citroën. The rational solution for the West is the one beckoning in the hill-towns of the Emilia Romagna, where small, capital-intensive shops employing skilled craftsmen and designers working in tandem are taking over ...”

“... again, only Herbert comes into precise comparison, Popish prelates and Dissenters not qualifying. Robert Herrick has three mentions, but his poetic genius is too lofty to arouse envy: one can but read with haunted admiration the deceptively innocent lyrical outpourings from his Devonshire vicarage. John Donne, the greatest of the deans of St ...”

“... of the present book as though he took part in this war on the virtuous side. Yet such is the case. Robert Kidd appeared on the recorded scene in 1689 at the age of about 44, as one of the crew of a buccaneering ship in the West Indies. Buccaneering and piracy were often much the same thing. Piracy had not yet acquired anything like the full odium of later ...”