“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It will end in 2025, with the bicentenary of the end of the wars and the independence of Bolivia. Robert Harvey’s splendid book gives us the first large-scale narrative of Latin America’s struggle for independence in English since – well, when exactly? It is hard to think of any comparable attempt to come to grips with the whole vast story, and in such ...”

“... fields. Most of these responses have developed or refined Said’s framework in some way. Not so Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. Irwin’s central point is that before there was Orientalism, there was Orientalism: the scholarly study of languages and texts pertaining to the Orient. The book operates on two levels. In ...”

“... of James’s philosophical practice are caught in this swift picture. I take these quotations from Robert Richardson’s William James, the most recent in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James ...”

“... If so, how and why did they separate? And, finally, have they now been reconciled? Robert Maillart’s Salginatobel Bridge of 1930. The modern distinction, at its simplest, is that architects invent – draw or model the shapes they want materials to take – and engineers calculate how those shapes, when realised, would respond to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the years up to 1917, before the arrival of British troops, by German archaeologists led by Robert Koldewey. The perspective drawings suggest something closer to a modern town planner’s ideas than to the crowded souks and tenements that one imagines, on the evidence of old Istanbul or Fez. But all ages, whatever their evidence, manage to give ...”

“... the movie is mostly about the way it looks. It’s meant to be a political thriller – based on Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost (the film has that title in the UK) – but it feels as if the writer went home halfway through, taking the story with him, and leaving the director and cinematographer to do what they could with the light and the setting. The ...”

“... where the scene is instantly and plausibly interpreted for us. ‘The inanimate body of poor Robert was consigned to the white waters of the gulf … and I gazed out over the great waste of waters with a spirit that was indeed disconsolate.’ In the film we see the wake of the ship, the sack with the body floating in the gleaming water, but it doesn’t ...”

“... of unsifted information is all quite riveting, in its slightly sick-making way, a bit like a Robert Ludlum thriller (or the ‘sweet, moist cakes’ Hitler gorged himself on during his final days underground), except everyone knows how it’s going to end. Hitler shot himself shortly after half past three on the afternoon of Monday 30 April 1945, and ...”

“... act and to be responsible for their actions is an essential aspect of who they are), and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) leading the yeses (he’s just had a difficult encounter with the mother of a young man they accidentally killed in a preceding film). Both are reasonable positions, and we may, according to our own politics, think either is confirmed or denied ...”