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“... 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 ...”

“... or resignation of our judgments upon the testimony of any Age or Author whatsoever’; and Robert Boyle ruled that it was ‘improper’ to ‘urge and rely on Testimonys for matters whose Truth or Falshood may be proved by manifest Reason or easy Experiment’. As Steven Shapin observes in his subtle and learned book, we should get a very misleading ...”

“... Ireland – if he did point one out. Far from merely straggling in the wake of a very large field, Robert Kee and Frank Callanan restore freshness to the scent by showing how much can still be quarried from close attention to Parnell’s career, not least to the press, which not only made and unmade his reputation but, alongside Hansard, supplied him with the ...”

“... the Wolfson Foundation and the British Government. I have condensed this latter-day story from Robert Knox’s 1992 monograph, which for the first time gives a detailed description of the whole Amaravati collection, including the pieces still in storage. The publication of Knox’s beautifully illustrated book, which builds on the work of a museum ...”

“... the literary origins of the two Victorian poets, Ash and LaMotte. Ash descends (swervingly) from Robert Browning; LaMotte is compounded from (but again, not reducible to) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. (Byatt lectured on all these writers in the days when she taught in the English Department of ‘Prince Albert ...”

“... goes on, as he often does, to a truly piercing criticism, in this case against Browning: ‘When Robert Browning denied that Shakespeare was capable of such an action as “unlocking his heart” (as Wordsworth said that he did) he classed himself with more nicety than he knew. The romantically machiavellian and detached ...”

“... world of Erasmus, ushering in that of Bacon and Grotius. In the twilight of the age of Erasmus, Robert Burton, ‘that fantastic great old man’, came of age at Oxford, a representative figure of Erasmian Humanism at its apogee. Most of his library is still to be found there as he wished, divided between the Bodleian Library, and Christ Church, where ...”

“... of an easy story. But it was Frazer who found his way onto the pages of the popular press. Why? Robert Fraser (no relation, different spelling) has not set out directly to answer that question, but his book does serve to highlight the problems of Frazer’s success. The Making of ‘The Golden Bough’, published to coincide with the centenary of the ...”

“... at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of course, one could object and say ...”

“... moment in a verbal contest, a gaudy, point scoring mockery against the serious-mindedness of Sir Robert Peel or, later, Gladstone. Byron’s is itinerant, physical, and (perhaps most distinctively) shuns the maternal and the doting for the anti-familial, for the generosity of pure sexual scandal. Disraeli, hermaphroditically gliding between his exotic ...”

“... a more damaging charge – especially since it was linked to the somewhat improbable vision of Dr Robert Runcie, as a spider at the centre of a web of intrigue, still manipulating everything his own way. But the question, of course, is not whether what Dr Bennett wrote was wounding or damaging: it is whether or not it is true. Has the Church, in fact, in ...”

“... obliquely related, spanning almost forty years: on Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to ...”

“... the Reformation was the work of a small minority, then much of it was bound to be ugly. In 1536 Robert Plumpton wrote to his mother: ‘You have much to thank God for that it should please him to give you licence to live until this time, for the Gospel of Christ was never so truely preached as it is now.’ For people like Plumpton and Thomas Cromwell, as ...”

“... leaders who made the Algerian revolution with Ben Bella, or like the intellectuals who fought with Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo for Zimbabwe. They make good company for the Revolucion people and the survivors of Cuba’s 26 July Movement. All were pushed aside or destroyed by the coming of the revolutionary police state, a restoration of the old coercive ...”