“... Boydell launched his Shakespeare Gallery, commissioning artists to paint scenes from the plays; Robert Bowyer opened a gallery of paintings illustrating scenes from Hume’s History of England. These and other such ventures were to be funded both by exhibiting the paintings themselves and engraving them for sale, whether as prints to be framed or as book ...”

“... of syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high ...”

“... yielded the poorest literature. With the exception of two lucid studies of its foundation, Robert Hildebrand’s Dumbarton Oaks (1990) and Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation (2003), each the work of a serious diplomatic historian, little or nothing of analytic interest exists about the organisation, which has proved an intellectual sink-hole, down ...”

“... to keep the ‘belly gods’ in check. Like all cultural expressions of the late modern condition, Robert Atkins and his low-carb kin both share in tradition and depart from it in telling ways. Consider how the LoCarbistas stand with respect to the appetites and the will. Virtually all the most popular diet writers of the last three decades thumb their noses ...”

“... not given Lord Snowdon’s number but the number he was actually calling from, which belonged to Robert Fox and his wife, Celestia. Fox was arrested. ‘Robert’s been arrested,’ his wife said when she rang Rupert and Min. ‘We were just going to bed, and the doorbell rang. Twelve policemen burst into the house and ...”

“... two women to be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed, Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers’; they were looking for her father, who was often on ...”

“... a certain vagueness to the reality of the texts. In any case, the fact that Duras and her husband, Robert Antelme, joined the Resistance in 1943, and that Antelme was arrested and deported to Buchenwald, made any worries about her early novels seem less pressing. I now think that my own will to preserve the faint aura of mystery surrounding early Duras at the ...”

“... in the personality of his subject. He accepts the account of Rhodes’s restless mind given by Robert Rotberg in The Founder (1988), which remains compelling even if some of its psychoanalysis now seems forced (Rhodes has middle-child energy and is locked in an ‘oedipal struggle’ with President Kruger of the Transvaal). Rather than fleshing out ...”

“... foe in Soviet communism. Buckley strutted the campus as a full-time anti-communist impresario. Robert Silvers, a Yale contemporary who later became the editor of the New York Review of Books, told Tanenhaus that Buckley ‘was so superior, so commanding’. He kept an aeroplane near the campus and employed a secretary to assist him as editor of the Yale ...”

“... She returned the following year and formed close friendships with two of the other residents, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell’s anti-communist crusade soon caused a ruckus (he accused another writer, Agnes Smedley, of being a Russian spy and the colony’s director, Elizabeth Ames, of colluding with her). When he cut his stay at Yaddo ...”

“... and drift of his writing. This exacting requirement has been triumphantly met in a new work by Robert DeMaria, as original in conception as it is energetic in execution. More remarkably still, DeMaria has done this by means of a study of the Dictionary, a book so large and disparate as to have seceded from the jurisdiction of modern criticism. In the ...”

“... to an occasional session of sweet silent thought, or even to the consulting of a concordance. Robert Browning, Luria, 1846 – I dedicate this last attempt for the present at Dramatic Poetry to a Great Dramatic Poet: ‘Wishing what I write may be read by his light’: if a phrase originally addressed, by not the least worthy of his contemporaries, to ...”

“... but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building took this form ...”

“... Mr Dagge the keeper, like Johnson’s own tough old drunken doctor friend of later years, Robert Levet, joins this company of the blest in the land of all our wishes. Of course Johnson is in no way deceived, either by his own feelings for Savage or by Savage’s own persistent fantasy projections of the self. Johnson’s most persistent fascination ...”

“... is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of ...”