“... and unproblematic, even something of an anticlimax’. Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Robert Cecil, had without her knowledge masterminded a succession plan, starting a clandestine correspondence with James two years before her death. Accordingly, James had been shown the proclamation announcing his accession that was read aloud at Richmond Palace ...”

“... vulgarity of Browning’; meets Walter de la Mare but records, ‘we had little to say’; judges Robert Graves to be an Ass; declares it ‘possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity’; refers to ‘greasy Epstein’, and to his admirer W.H. Auden as belonging (mysteriously) with ‘the corduroy panzers’; dismisses the Poet Laureate as ‘poor old John ...”

“... is gradually revealed as he tells us with disgust about an American marketing executive with a Robert Redford moustache who is ordering Pimm’s in an irritating manner, spoiling the atmosphere of a pub which Croucher favours. This bounder is called Tony (Croucher’s least favourite name) and kisses a British girl ‘full on the lips’. This is ‘not ...”

“... while debating whether he fits the category of historian. Much better use could have been made of Robert Brentano’s amazing essay on ‘The Sound of Stubbs’, which gets an endnote. But such lists are unimpressively easy to compile and doing so is a sort of Actonian party game, though one encouraged by Kenyon’s general tone and approach. True, the ...”

“... Divided is the fourth monograph in the ‘Science Fiction Writers Series’. The general editor is Robert Scholes, an academic who has led the critical gentrification of SF over the past decade. The first three books in his series were devoted to Robert Heinlein, H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov. The aim, quite clearly, is to ...”

“... and benefactors, as an attempt, he claimed, to ‘promote virtue and piety’ in his readers. Robert Schofield is well qualified to follow Priestley’s uneven path across the intellectual landscape of 18th-century society. He was trained during and after World War Two as an atomic physicist and engineer, at a moment when once again practical science ...”

“... in the present version of Tawaststjerna’s book. Aping Sibelius’s own habits of compression, Robert Layton has run the last two Swedish Finnish volumes into one, truncating or omitting the musicological I chapters that counterpoint the biographical narrative throughout and unbalancing his own English version, which retains them in Volumes I (a ...”

“... Actual behavioural change is more difficult to assess. Masters and Johnson and their colleague Robert Kolodny argue in Crisis that sexual behaviour in the United States among both homosexuals and heterosexuals has not yet altered enough to make a significant difference. In addition to the time-lapse between infection and the appearance of symptoms, which ...”

“... enough from their media involvement at the time – Richard Neville himself, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Charles Shaar Murray. Some people died, but only the famously talented (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison) stick in the public memory. Most of the freaks, hippies and radicals recognised that youth was just a holiday, and come the end of the summer of love ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be wrong, however, to allow pedantic ...”

“... can be, and what a torture of guilt it makes breaking away.’Auden was 15 when his schoolfriend Robert Medley suggested that he might try his hand at writing poems.Kicking a little stone, he turned to meAnd said, ‘Tell me, do you write poetry?’I never had, and said so, but I knewThat very moment what I wished to do.At 15, Auden knew, too, that he was ...”

“... reflected the broad spectrum of opinion that saw the flag as a sacred symbol of American freedoms. Robert Justin Goldstein’s Burning the Flag thoughtfully draws on the disciplines of law, political science and history to analyse the controversy in all its dimensions. The author is on the side of the civil libertarians, and his book concludes with the Supreme ...”

“... Neanderthals did not range far from home, so never developed similar links with their own kind. As Robert Foley shows in Humans before Humanity, Darwinian gradualism means that we crossed no particular cultural rubicon. Whatever it is that makes us human may depend on the complex interaction of all sorts of small changes in human reproductive and social ...”

“... mad doctor, and finds comfort and a new sexual identity in the arms of Veronica, a fellow student. Robert meanwhile, another student, falls in love with Sarah, and would do anything for her, and eventually does. The plotting of this novel is so intricate, so dependent on surprise and on characters showing up in altered circumstances, that I can’t tell much ...”