“... or imaginative domain. The Irish Dissenter John Toland fellow-travelled with pantheism, while Robert Clayton, a colleague of Berkeley, was convinced that Nature was secretly spirit. Even the great 19th-century Irish scientist John Tyndall, who discovered the reason the sky is blue, believed that matter was essentially mystical and transcendental. There is ...”

“... architectural policy of the next British monarch, as well as of the current mayor of Rome. Robert Stern, once a board member of the Disney Corporation, now dean of Yale’s School of Architecture and the author of the introduction to Krier’s latest book, is the architect of the presidential library of George W. Bush, now under construction in ...”

“... that comes from disbelief, and perhaps his love pursuits were similarly energised. O’Gorman may have been intending to pursue some fancy thesis of this kind, but in the end he despaired of his attempts to ‘find a way to deal with this erotic element’ – indeed, the poet’s widow threatened to sue him if he kept on trying. His biography of Tate ...”

“... The Compleat Drawing-Book​, published by Fleet Street printseller Robert Sayer in 1755, is a handbook for the amateur artist that aims to provide ‘Proper Instructions to Youth for their Entertainment and Improvement in this Art’. The core of the book is a series of ‘Many and Curious Specimens’: prints from images ‘engrav’d on one hundred copper-plates’ that present vignettes to study and copy ...”

“... to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy derived from the paternal authority that Adam and subsequent biblical fathers exercised over their families and servants.More recently, scholars have slightly qualified Laslett’s findings, pushing the ...”

“... open now and then, as, for example, by Clause 41 of the Great Charter of 1215: ‘All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear, and may stay or travel within it, by land or water, for purposes of trade, free from all illegal exactions, in accordance with ancient and lawful customs.’ There were toll ...”

“... rightly thinking it available elsewhere, but he does publish the touching letter Max wrote to Robert Ross, Oscar’s premier initiator, when he was in New York with his half-brother, the famous impresario Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. A Canadian adventurer and confirmed homosexual, Ross was a remarkable and on the whole a rather good man, who became influential ...”

“... published) is often absent from the English edition, or else it is incorrect or incomplete. One may think that it does not make a huge difference to know that Bataille never published Madame Edwarda under his own name, contrary to what the Publisher’s Note in this edition tells us. And yet the fact that in 1956 Bataille published a solemn celebratory ...”

“... Picasso’s position was by no means inevitable within the avant-garde circles of his day. Robert and Sonia Delaunay, both of them practising artists of considerable originality, must have maintained a very different kind of relationship from that of Picasso and Fernande or Picasso and Ewa. Paradoxically, given his tendency to excuse or justify ...”

“... poems as well. I haven’t seen them yet, but I doubt if they will be much good. Of course, they may be, but I have my misgivings. Anyway, what does he want with publishing poems: it is no time for poetry. God knows what it is a time for. Larkin, of course, was no slouch when it came to skewering his literary rivals. In these early years, though, he is ...”

“... in his way. Certain kinds of evidence will be wilfully denied him, certain other kinds may be offered too profusely or inaccurately. The exact nature of these difficulties will vary with the biographer and with the subject. Why is a particular biography written? Is the pop star or the footballer being promoted by an advertising man or denigrated by ...”

“... than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind. A good half of the book is pictorial ...”

“... contradictions of his being most subtly and most dramatically. In The Double in Literature (1970) Robert Rogers pointed out that the young captain narrator ‘symbolically summoned his double’ by leaving a rope-ladder dangling over the side, as if in a tale by Hoffmann, whom Conrad mentions elsewhere, and that the story conjures up the contrasting sides of ...”

“... the Continent with a succession of séances, two or three of which were attended by Elizabeth and Robert Browning. On the first occasion, an unseen hand lowered a clematis wreath (laurel was hard to come by) on Elizabeth’s brow. She believed in spiritual manifestations, but Robert, though he shared her dislike of ...”

“... not just as hero but as a kind of secular saint. Recalling the mild furore a few years ago over Robert Gittings’s life of Hardy, with its intimations that the great advocate of loving-kindness could be snobbish and mean-spirited, severe with his servants and a brute to his wife, one is bound to reflect that even today the faith is not quite ...”