“... public. The transformation of public attitudes effected by the activities of Mrs Thatcher and Sir Robert Armstrong can be estimated by contrasting the present cynicism about relationships between politicians and civil servants with, say, the absolute confidence of the generation of Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay that ministers would feel no temptation to ...”

“... time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and attracted the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five poems from a ...”

“... the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am constantly amazed at the ease with which I entered British newspapers,’ he later said. Stick it up your punter! tells that story, and the story of what happened afterwards: a story which social ...”

“... general, waste good material on his correspondents. He was, he wrote to the Hungarian film-maker Robert Lazlo, ‘a bad letter-writer’. His replies were terse, polite and to the point. ‘I wish I could write you as interesting letters as you write to me, but nothing goes on outside my window except blue sea and mountains,’ he wrote to Skvorecky. His ...”

“... Something was supposed to stick, and stick it did thanks to the assiduous repetitions of Captain Robert Maxwell and his ‘Labour paper’. But the actual money, as Milne shows, cannot have and did not come from Libya. And the timing of its deployment and discovery was so exquisitely calibrated as to require the intervention of someone with knowledge gained ...”

“... was a joke whose far from trivial point retains a certain wry resonance after almost thirty years. Robert Cottreil’s The End of Hong Kong is a different proposition from Segal’s book. It is a detailed, well-written and basically plausible reconstruction of the negotiations between Britain and China that eventually led to the Joint Declaration of ...”

“... be. And the governments in which he has served have done some very un-nice things indeed. As Robert Taylor points out in his trenchant essay on industrial relations, ‘prime ministerial words of compassion were often belied by harshness of executive action.’ Indeed, the Government seems largely insensitive to the poverty its policies have created and ...”

“... setting and display the ideological input into his science are not new, however. For two decades Robert Young has been preaching that Darwin’s Malthusian science was inseparable from the social and economic issues of his class and culture – part of a changing philosophy of nature accompanying a shifting social order. Six of Young’s seminal essays ...”

“... literary event. Indeed, it was a literary event in a good many different, though related ways. As Robert Darnton has emphasised, it was a literary event in that it unlocked the printing presses and called forth a torrent of newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and essays. Where France possessed no uncensored newspapers before 1789, almost two hundred journals ...”

“... and by no means as radical as some of those she appointed to run the Church would have wished. Robert Whiting’s book assesses the impact of all these changes in the parishes. His is a study of the religion of ordinary people in Devon and Cornwall. Meticulous and thorough, the fruit of years of reflection and hard work in the archives, it suffers from a ...”

“... rightly thinking it available elsewhere, but he does publish the touching letter Max wrote to Robert Ross, Oscar’s premier initiator, when he was in New York with his half-brother, the famous impresario Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. A Canadian adventurer and confirmed homosexual, Ross was a remarkable and on the whole a rather good man, who became influential ...”

“... was to rival the Angelic Doctor St Thomas Aquinas. I tried to imagine, as I read this book in Robert Hurley’s translation (which is on the whole excellent, although there are two mistranslations on page 85 which make a mess of an already difficult paragraph), what it would be like to read Theory of Religion without knowing any of Bataille’s other ...”

“... reform. It remains an open question whether Castro will be that ‘pragmatic’ even now. Robert Quirk’s new biography devotes only 34 pages to the Eighties and Nineties. Otherwise, the topics covered by earlier biographies are exhaustively recapitulated, at the expense of the subsequent developments that invite reappraisal of Castro’s whole ...”

“... not come back. In the first poem in My Alexandria, ‘Demolition’, Doty invokes the ghost of Robert Lowell: many of the poems take their bearings from Lowell’s clotted diction, from what Doty calls his ‘ruthless energy’, from Lowell’s interest in burning the poem onto the page, heaping on adjectives to fuel the fire, invoking the Old ...”

“... the public, at Buscot Park.) Some of these figures acquire a larger life in Macleod’s main text: Robert Vernon, son of a prosperous tradesman, who like Mr Bounderby exaggerated the lowliness of his origins; John Sheepshanks, so shabbily dressed that he was once refused admission to a first-class railway carriage, who told raucous jokes to the Prime Minister ...”