“... trying to steal apples; standing rapt before a fruit stall, gazing at ripe pears. Today it’s Robert and Jon who are on a spree: they steal a yoghurt, a milkshake, two cartons of Ambrosia rice. Finally they steal a child, blond-haired, not quite three. One of them takes him by the hand. They lead him into the city. They walk some busy roads, they are seen ...”

“... Picasso’s position was by no means inevitable within the avant-garde circles of his day. Robert and Sonia Delaunay, both of them practising artists of considerable originality, must have maintained a very different kind of relationship from that of Picasso and Fernande or Picasso and Ewa. Paradoxically, given his tendency to excuse or justify ...”

“... from him. The sad thing is that in real life Mr Carter is a literary journalist of some repute. As Robert Haupt’s successor to the editorship of the Age Monthly Review, he inhabits a milieu, or space, in which the standards of plain speaking were set by the redoubtable Michael Davie, who really should get back there and sort out his errant protégés as soon ...”

“... the Nazi leaders. As early as July 1933, with Hitler only just ensconced as German Chancellor, Robert Bruce-Lockhart records conversations between the Prince and the grandson of the former Kaiser, Prince Louis-Ferdinand: ‘The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re ...”

“... Such modelling affects us as ontological metaphor. The art collection inherited and extended by Robert Lehman, vice-president of the Metropolitan Museum in New York from 1941 to 1967 and chairman of the board there from 1967 until his death in 1969, was presented posthumously to that museum by his Foundation in accordance with his wishes. The terms dictated ...”

“... obvious solution to anyone struggling to make a living out of writing. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, all did their time on studio payrolls, and West and Fitzgerald in their respective last works, The Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon, somehow succeeded in putting its ridiculous myths to serious ...”

“... more to be enjoyed than a complicated anyone. For Amis, it became easier to trade limericks with Robert Conquest than to keep up the old banter with a Larkin who, in later years, he rarely saw. The Amis/Larkin correspondence is what makes this book a document worth having and one wishes that perhaps one day these letters might be published as a separate ...”

“... and assiduous, here is a thoroughly decent book. It has none of the sleazy sanctimony of Robert Sencourt’s biography, or the vanity of T.S. Matthews’. That it is a feat to be without spite is coincidentally manifested by the appearance of Geoffrey Grigson’s Recollections. Grigson’s jacket proffers, as a representative gnome: ‘I never heard ...”

“... thought drew more heavily on French monarchomachi than the English ever did, and a man like Robert Baillie felt more involved in the progress of the Thirty Years’ War than the English normally did. Indeed, it is an important part of why the Scots resisted the invention of ‘Anglicanism’ during the 1630s that they were far more aware than their ...”

“... with quite the mixture of coolness and condescension accorded to the thoroughly rational man. Robert Musil wrote of the wife of a civil servant that ‘what she called “soul” was nothing but a small capital of capacity for love that she had possessed at the time of her marriage. Permanent Secretary Tuzzi was not the right stock to invest it in ...”

“... high tragic conflagration Yeats made of it when he put it to the torch of ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’. Paulin has learnt, probably from Seamus Heaney, how to put his sense of immediate provocation under the protection of natural and epic grandeurs. I’m surprised that the rhetorical procedure – which is just as questionable as Yeats’s ...”

“... far as the beginning of the century. In a paper published in 1913, the gifted young anthropologist Robert Hertz, soon to be killed in the First World War, studied the cult of Saint Besse as an expression of the values of an Alpine community, ‘taking us inside the consciousness, otherwise so distant and so closed, of the mountain people’. In his Medieval ...”

“... supply a good deal to trim the balance. It is a mistaken though still lingering idea, Robert Sykes writes, that Chartism and trade-unionism had only marginal connections: they were in close touch in Lancashire throughout the early Chartist years. Chartists there were workers as well, a cross-section of ‘skilled but insecure artisans and factory ...”

“... of a taxi by David Frost during the expensive year when he functioned as the club’s secretary.) Robert Helpmann choreographed all the Footlights revues in the late Thirties. Things picked up under his regime to the extent that the chorus line, instead of being Dadie Rylands protégés dolled up in point shoes and tutus, were rugby-players dolled up in point ...”

“... a real yawn. Supported apparently by a battery of what are known in the trade as research workers, Robert Lacey has organised this rubbish and added to it some vaguely historical and cultural talk: he even manages to mention Plato. What emerges is less a picture of anything that could be called an aristocracy than the portrait of a Cambridge-educated historian ...”