“... take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in literature, film and other cultural forms, of those who do write – manuscripts and memos, forms and faxes’. In these days of computers, with authors emailing finished manuscripts to publishers (and for all I know ...”

“... attitude to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... early found that no one can make a living simply by being a good writer, Colette became an expert self-publicist, for which she had a natural turn. A major item in her stock-in-trade was to put herself over as someone who knew, from experience, everything there was to know about sex. Since she disliked her brothers, she no doubt pounced on her stepson as her ...”

“... the view of a single individual. The author of every utopia invariably takes his vision to be self-evidently the only possible one for the fully rational man. He is necessarily committed to the claim that there is a common purpose behind all human communities, a single goal, which most men have failed to reach because they were not clear-sighted enough to ...”

“... My scoffs were absolutely 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 think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic. Now Merrill is available to the English in a slim volume of his best work, selected by him shortly before his death in 1995. Merrill was far from ...”

“... rhyme, can hope to convey both their individual voices and their collective charm. It is here that Robert Kehew’s anthology, Lark in the Morning, succeeds so brilliantly. Kehew’s bilingual edition includes 28 poets and 55 songs, extending from the ‘First Troubadour’, Guillem de Peiteus (1071-1127, but see the cautions above), to the last, Guiraut ...”

“... Wotton’s ambitions were quickly stalled by the penurious caution of James’s ministers, notably Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, as well as by the ‘calcified habits’ of Venice’s ruling gerontocracy. Meanwhile French diplomatic intervention quietly accomplished a peaceable resolution of the dispute, with the papal interdict lifted in April 1607.The ...”

“... mutations she left her own mark on minds and events. It is not too much to say that this strange, self-educated, self-propelled little woman deserves a place among the makers of modern India. The temptation is to draw a continuous line from the first royal charter granted by another warrior queen on the last day of ...”

“... In ‘Margaret Fuller Drowned’, a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark ...”

“... is to be held and done in common; nobody is to be unwillingly obeyed; in the sunlight of what Robert Burns called ‘social love’, human beings return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our ...”

“... House, survives. Burlington House was sold off to the government in the 1850s and modified by Robert Smirke, with what Pevsner called ‘high Victorian cruelty’, to house the Royal Academy. Charles Barry Jr and Robert Banks added the ranges that enclose the courtyard and house the Linnean, Geological and Astronomical ...”

“... historian’s task, in the very subjects it studies, Venturi’s history could not be more unlike Robert Darnton’s new book. Venturi is interested in how great events were understood by great, or at least highly articulate, minds. Darnton is concerned with apparently insignificant events – not the American Revolution but a slaughter of cats – and in ...”

“... lickspittles extends from his colleagues on the Culture Committee to the BBC business editor Robert Peston and the Director of Public Prosecutions. A polemic can hardly be faulted for being quick to judge, but there is an important issue here. Although it’s easy to look on News International’s predicament with some satisfaction, we shouldn’t forget ...”