“... 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 ...”

“... who wants to play the piano is willing to learn’. The keyboard analogy continues. Ellen’s son, Robert, had ‘real ambitions to be a pianist and not just a pianoplayer or joanna-thumper’, but he was not very good at playing with women. His marriage was not properly consummated until he took his wife and mother-in-law (bitchily described by Ellen) on an ...”

“... effluent. Lord Normanbrook, a predecessor in the Highest Office of State now held by Sir Robert Strongarm, long ago decided this point: ‘any information arising in a government department is officially secret until it is officially released’ (Filchbag Peeper, The Law of Official Leaking, 1978, p. 209). Information was only in the ‘public ...”

“... and close relationships with senior figures in the Elizabethan regime, such as William Cecil and Robert Dudley. His activities abroad were instrumental in his appointment as principal secretary to the queen in 1573, which marked the beginning of nearly two decades of virtually uninterrupted activity at the heart of government. Cooper’s portrait necessarily ...”

“... of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at Yaddo in 1948. Gordon had impeccable literary credentials. As a young writer, she had been mentored by Ford Madox Ford, who had her read an early draft of her first novel, Penhally, out loud to him. She was edited by ...”

“... as the archetypal Delta bluesman, a precursor to Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James and Robert Johnson: vagrants, rounders, always on the move – pursued, as Handy put it, by ‘suffering and hard luck’, conceiving their music ‘in aching hearts’. Hari Kunzru’s new novel is, among other things, a fictional meditation on the figure of the ...”

“... Uwe Kitzinger, who published a fascinating ‘instant’ study of the campaign in 1976, but Robert Saunders offers something different: a comprehensive historical account, which relates debates about Europe to the wider social and cultural contexts of Britain in the 1970s. The Sex Discrimination Act became law in 1975, and Saunders devotes considerable ...”