“... beds are sailing into a harbour where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral. The translation is Robert Hass’s, in The Essential Neruda. And here is the end of a poem called ‘Those Lives’, from Isla Negra: Y si algo vi en mi vida fue una tarde en la India, en las márgenes de un río: arder una mujer de carne y hueso y no sé si era el alma o era el ...”

“... Baby rats. Thrashy rats. Ugly, dirty scratchy rats. Funny, jumpy cute rats.’ And then there is Robert Sullivan’s delightful and revolting Rats, the most exhaustive, nauseating and pleasurable compendium of rat facts ever set down. Facts such as: wherever there are human beings, there are rats. China is where the rat originated, and where you can find it ...”

“... The Best Man and, beginning in the late 1960s, an impressive roster of American writers, including Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth and Garry Wills – whose analyses of Nixon, Reagan and Wayne blazed the trail for Nixon at the Movies – took him on as a character. Pundits have searched for ...”

“... the unfortunate Wordsworth, who presided over ‘moderate anarchy’ until the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, came to the rescue of his old school by installing him as a canon of Westminster). But Tyerman suggests that more often than not the governors, staff and boys (or some combination of the three) were glad to see the back of any incumbent Head, even ...”

“... Victoria in 1897. The thumping Unionist electoral triumph of 1895 was confidently ascribed by Sir Robert Ensor (who had been a Winchester schoolboy at the time) to an upsurge of expansionist imperialism, while A.G. Gardiner, the biographer of Sir William Harcourt, spoke of ‘a tidal wave of Jingoism’, as ‘the arrogant nationalism of Mr Kipling and the ...”

“... she just held up a flapping book of cheques or something and waved them at me from her chair. ‘Robert,’ she said, ‘we’re in the money. Today we’re a couple of rich kids you and me.’ ‘Is that a chequebook?’ I asked. ‘These were before chequebooks,’ she said. ‘This is savings stamps from the old Midland Bank machine on Queenstown ...”

“... Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain completes a remarkable biography. No other biographer of Keynes is likely to surpass it, and everyone who has an interest in the intellectual and public life of this country is in Skidelsky’s debt. This third volume starts in 1937, where the second volume left off ...”

“... Robert Henryson is the most likeable late medieval author after Chaucer. He wrote with a directness, a lightly carried learning and a lack of sentimentality hard to match anywhere in the British Isles at any date. A late and sadly unreliable anecdote conveys something of his style. Francis Kynaston reported in the early 17th century that when Henryson was dying of diarrhoea (probably around 1500) a cunning woman told him to go and circle a rowan tree chanting ‘whikey tree, whikey tree, take away this flux from me ...”

“... sort of thinking for years but has finally succumbed to it in collaboration with his MIT colleague Robert Berwick, producing Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. Identifying the earliest known symbolic object, a geometrically engraved plaque from South Africa dating from eighty thousand years ago, the authors infer that it indicates the emergence of the human ...”

“... yell of dissent against Conservatism as we know it. Echoing the Red Toryism recently espoused by Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow, who proposed rebranding the Conservatives as the Workers’ Party, the manifesto loudly repudiated ‘untrammelled free markets’ and sent out a confident, demotic counter-echo to Thatcher’s notorious claim that there was no such ...”

“... State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, then quickly painted over by order of its commissioner, Robert Moses, might disagree on that last point.‘Myth and literature have imagined what can be neither known nor decided’ in law, so Heller-Roazen often resorts to fiction. Law drops the missing person once his case is closed by return or death, but myth and ...”

“... Feeling to the influence exerted on the apprentice songwriter Russell by poets such as Ginsberg, Robert Bly and Ezra Pound; William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley in particular inspired the ‘idea of using simple language to convey something very beautiful’. Russell also spoke about how he wanted his home-studio ...”

“... properly) advised by his lawyers to settle for £5000. The barrister who advised him was Robert McCartney QC. Mr McCartney had recently won a celebrated libel action in Belfast against the Sunday World. The paper had alleged, falsely, that Mr McCartney and another barrister had had a row in a café over the last available cream bun. This report, the ...”

“... turns out to be an important asset. Grey complained bitterly when his father took a peerage; Lord Robert Cecil (as he then was) thought, when his elder brother’s death made him the heir to the marquessate, that his political career had been marred. Both hated leaving the Commons for the Lords; both benefited from the move. Salisbury would not have made a ...”

“... a story there can elude images left by Graham Greene, Carol Reed and the gifted cinematographer Robert Krasker. At one point Kerr goes out of his way to invite comparisons, introducing the very racket which damned Harry Lime, the black market in penicillin. He is not too shy to bring in Vienna’s four-man, four-nationality jeep patrol, made famous in the ...”