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“... translations of Colette to appear in Britain. It gives, however, no feel of Colette whatever. Robert Phelps makes a sound and lively job of his selection of her letters, which constitutes in effect an autobiography in outline. He includes a letter (or is it a poem? is her concreteness of imagery in fact more Japanese than English?) that might be by ...”

“... although they would have delighted, Veronese, Rubens or Reynolds. Delaroche’s picture presents Robert Rosenblum with ‘the immediate illusion of a theatrical tableau enacted by costumed players in a crystal-clear space’. It was painted for – one might say took place at – the Salon of 1834. By then many paintings were designed primarily for the great ...”

“... incident occurs. Here we are close to the art of the stage conjurer: a point well made by Robert Barnard in his concise and extremely acute book. Again, over this long period of time the clue tends steadily to refine and even attenuate itself in consonance with the enhanced acuity of readers. It is no longer at all likely to be the imprint of a boot ...”

“... Winstanley and Harrington, but I found his chapters on lesser writers even more instructive. Robert Burton and Samuel Gott are revealed as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised. Dr Davis is also interesting on William Sprigge’s A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth of 1659, the anonymous Chaos (1659) and The Free State of Noland ...”

“... few, if any, human beings are in fact well-placed to alter it in an intended manner. Professor Robert Neild’s polemic is concerned with a more parochial topic than his title suggests: not with making up one’s mind about the Bomb but with the more manageable task of making up one’s mind about the proper role of the Bomb within the defence policy of ...”

“... by Thomas Rowlandson at his liveliest, ranging from the satirical to the rustic. The text is by Robert Southey, condensed from his 1807 report on England purporting to be by a Spanish nobleman, and the joke consists of finding Southey phrases to fit Rowlandson pictures, or vice versa. One objection to this forced union is that Southey was less preoccupied ...”

“... boldly written about their authenticity in the Sunday Times, Murdoch swept him aside, according to Robert Harris, with the memorable line: ‘Fuck Dacre, publish.’ Meanwhile the historian David Irving denounced the diaries as fakes, on the radio and television of three countries, although he had no sound evidence for saying so. Two weeks later, when everyone ...”

“... whereas for others of us (Seamus Heaney, for one, who recently incorporated the poem – in Robert Pinsky’s superb translation – into a fervent lecture on poetry and political witness), ‘Incantation’ is a poem to freeze the spittled irony upon the lips of even the most malignant of ironists. In this, it partakes – though utterly different in ...”

“... in the year 1855, and the narration takes the form of letters written by a young American, Robert Booth, to his friend Professor Prescott, an authority on Theoretical and Practical Ethics. Booth, in retreat from rejection in love and a sense of his own failure in literature, has known at least one stroke of luck: he has become, he tells his ...”

“... are some details, such as those about the Crucifixion, which the writers claimed as fitting in. Robert Graves has made splendid use of this line of explanation in The Nazarene Gospel Restored, deducing an entirely credible character. According to Mark and Matthew, the last words of Jesus were ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, though the other two ...”

“... a deadly activity. It literally killed, or was believed to, which sometimes had the same result. Robert Elliott’s classic study of The Power of Satire tells us that poems were used as weapons of war in pre-Islamic Arabia, and it is not only there, or in the curses of primitive tribesmen remote from our literary tradition, that this ‘power’ showed ...”

“... denunciation, makes it clear: the name was criminal enough. Pliny stands as first witness in Robert Wilken’s The Christians as the Romans saw them, a relaxed survey of some familiar texts and their backgrounds. The exposition is clear and open-minded, though not always reliable in detail (‘Thystes’ for Thyestes’, ‘chriophoros’ for ...”

“... his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks Richard far too modern. Richard wins Robert’s girlfriend, Nelly Moreton, although Richard fears she is too young for him: they have much in common, Richard and Nelly, both being ...”

“... by two refugee physicists in Birmingham, the German-born Rudolf Peierls and the Austrian-born Otto Robert Frisch, when they found that the critical mass of the fissile uranium isotope 235 needed for an explosion was no more than a few kilograms. In the summer of 1941 Peierls engaged Fuchs to help him with theoretical work on the project. Nine years later Fuchs ...”

“... Guinness, Barlow Clowes, BCCI and now Maxwell. Indeed, Maxwell bids fair to be one of the best. Robert Maxwell was a rogue of the first order, but no one can say that we were not warned: in 1971 the Department of Trade and Industry warned that he was ‘not a fit and proper person to have charge of a public company’. Not the least interesting question is ...”