“... 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 ...”

“... was in the Marshalsea. It wasn’t the childhood he wanted, so he hadn’t spoken about it. For Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, in his clever new study, the mass of biographies can make Dickens’s life seem as inevitable as a fairy tale, his genius so self-evident that a novelist’s career was certain. But the alternative lives he might have led, as a debtor ...”

“... only much later that I realised my interview had taken place the day after he testified against Robert Oppenheimer. Another thing I didn’t know in 1957 was the very active role that many of the academics I knew had played in creating the bomb. At Harvard, Norman Ramsey had been involved in selecting the plane that delivered the bomb over Japan. He also ...”

“... of a friend before Hereford was first taken in September 1642, and bitterly recorded that Captain Robert Hammond and ‘his barbarous company’ seized her prized bay mares, some money and ‘much linen’. Worse was to come. The uncertainty of the times damaged Jeffreys’s business: she found collecting her money more and more difficult, and became ...”

“... funeral took place before the report came in, and, as the ceremony was ending, a man called Robert Burns – Shirley Ann’s uncle – took out a Beretta and shot the reverend three times in the head. There was no insurance, but Radney was quick to see fresh opportunities. Burns had done what half the town dreamed of doing, and few people wanted to see ...”

“... called them in 1814) all made the same move, whether from conviction, pragmatism, or both. Robert Southey, whose incendiary drama Wat Tyler (1794) had been too hot for even the most reckless publisher to touch at the height of the revolution panic, was now cheerfully knocking out loyal odes in his role as poet laureate. Southey was consistent, as ...”

“... with Ben Jonson, the source of the title, whom Lake eventually gets to, rather like the dragon in Robert Graves’s poem. Jonson had the most turbulent, up and down existence of any of Britain’s greatest writers. It’s just possible that he was the son, born posthumously, of a radically alienated Puritan preacher, ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... millenarian preachers among them) that 1857 marked the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, when Robert Clive asserted East India Company ascendancy in Bengal. In the event, it was gun cartridges that set the mutiny off: they were greased, the sepoys believed, with a blend of cow and pig fat, which would defile both Hindus and Muslims when they bit the ends ...”

“... Northern counterparts, if not as the forebears of a European modernity that was still in embryo as Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox. More troublingly, the compatibility of slavery with these ‘conjectures of order’ raises questions about the integrity both of American history and of the modern world that O’Brien’s Southerners imperfectly ...”

“... one and the same. (Obviously we have to make an exception for industrial novelists like the late Robert Ludlum, who have a team who write the books as well as others who type them before they add their authorial name, so that there are three layers to the finished manuscript – or possibly four if you include the ‘ideas’ officer.) There was a brief ...”

“... he had taken the plummiest diplomatic posting conceivable, becoming an assistant to his uncle, Robert Cecil, at the Paris Peace Conference. Thereafter Cranborne pursued a career in the City. He was quite hopeless but, of course, became the director of a bank. Lyttelton, on the other hand, showed great business acumen and rose rapidly on his merits. Both ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”