“... adds to a 75-year pile-up of biographies, movies, novels and documentaries. Writers including Robert Penn Warren and Sinclair Lewis (All the King’s Men and It Can’t Happen Here); the directors Robert Rossen, Ken Burns and Stephen Zaillian; and the actors John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... religious reformer George Rapp, and purchased in 1825 by the most celebrated of the new utopians, Robert Owen, whose ‘Villages of Unity and Mutual Co-operation’, where inequality, private property and organised religion were to be banished for ever, were typical of the American Utopia. Their members had, as Kumar says, been convinced ‘that, if the world ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... La Rochelle, Céline, Montherlant, Châteaubriant and Chardonne. Curiously, he made no mention of Robert Brasillach. Brasillach had published his first book (on Virgil) in 1931, when he was 22. He went on to write essays, poetry, novels and history, including a history of the cinema, which he wrote with his equally right-wing brother-in-law, Maurice ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Blake, crucial to the development of aesthetic thought in the period. His allegiance to Robert Browning, recipient of several deferentially adoring letters in these volumes, was comparable, and became yet more fervent after his first meeting with ‘the glorious Robert’ in 1851. Gabriel was among the few to see ...”

“... complaint that his analyst, Masud Khan, was himself a patient and confidant of Winnicott – Robert Rodman even conjectures a homosexual attraction – all the time he was treating Godley in such extraordinary ways.* And Godley’s stepdaughter was another of Winnicott’s patients.Khan was by any standards and in any company a wild and perhaps even a ...”

“... about the impact of the paper were made in a leader in the same issue of the journal by Robert Chen and Frank DeStefano from the US Vaccine Safety and Development National Immunisation Program at the Centers for Disease Control: Vaccine-safety concerns such as that reported by Wakefield and colleagues may snowball into societal tragedies when the ...”

“... recipients are now well trained. Which is why America’s Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its first ...”

“... If someone were to ask why art and culture have proved so vital to the modern age, one might do worse than reply: to compensate for the decline of religion. It is certainly a more convincing response than claiming that modern society finds art particularly valuable, as opposed to richly profitable. What modernity finds precious is less works of art, which are just one more commodity in its marketplace, than the idea of the aesthetic ...”