“... John Francis Byrne, on whom he based the character of Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new volume of annotations to Ulysses, ‘he returned with his friend J.F. Byrne late at night to Byrne’s house at 7 Eccles ...”

“... number of other members of the Movement for Democratic Change were arrested, tortured and beaten. Robert Mugabe had banned all MDC meetings and rallies in the hope of suppressing the MDC completely before this year’s elections. The local churches entered the fray and organised a prayer meeting in Highfield, a suburb of Harare. Tsvangirai drove to the ...”

“... of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business ...”

“... Keeper. Elizabeth was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most influential contemporaries, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Francis Bacon. The Cooke sisters were a byword for intelligence and high education. Their family home at Gidea Hall, near Romford, was described by the Cambridge scholar Walter Haddon as a ‘little university’, and here they learned ...”

“... Born,​ out of wedlock, in Rome in 1880 to a high-spirited, convent-educated but unconventional young aristocrat of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky ...”

“... concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet. Earlier that year Ashbery had been turned down by the Fulbright committee ...”

“... or not I am legally a ‘UK citizen’, but only I can know if I feel British.Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford’s Brexitland is a sweeping and rigorous demographic and attitudinal study of recent British history, which uses the 2016 EU referendum as a way of exploring the shifting sands of political identity since the Second World War. The political ...”

“... cosmic rather than merely economic. In the 1850s a substantial number of socialists had followed Robert Owen into spiritualism and his son, Robert Dale Owen, became a leader of the spiritualist movement in America. Interest in ghosts and communication with the dead was also a preoccupation of the early Fabians. So much so ...”

“... The antiquity of this figure is the subject of a very learned and also very amusing book by Robert Merton; the received wisdom is that it goes at least as far back as the 12th century. So there is nothing very modern about worrying about what it means to be modern, and even if you think that being modern requires a total rejection of the past, like ...”

“... Comintern’ comes in for further treatment, this time in a long autobiographical essay by Robert Cecil. Perhaps the chief novelty is the persistent implication that the writer, academic and MP, Goronwy Rees, may have been active in the Soviet cause over a considerable period of years. If so, it certainly lends a new twist to one’s reading of the ...”

“... is explicit sympathy for the old dying alone, for exploited husbands and overworked wives, for the young with their fragile illusions: but it is all cold comfort. ‘They’ are marched up and down their streets without much sensitivity, either imaginative or metrical; the flat caps are matched by a flat-footed rhymeless pentameter. Dunn reproaches himself in ...”

“... had a dozen illegitimate sons and one legitimate one, who was drowned with most of the court’s young bloods in a wreck Orderic describes brilliantly). The Normans’ genius lay in targeting the richest and most prestigious corporations in the 11th-century bull-market, then squeezing them for all they were worth and more. They knew how to use the ...”

“... artist, to develop rather than possess innately). While Schuyler and his circle tolerated Auden, Robert Lowell and his reputation gave them fits. Schuyler would define his poetic project, at least in part, by opposing it to that of Lowell and the other gloomy campus darlings of the New Critics: New York poets, except I suppose the colour-blind, are affected ...”

“... wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward ...”

“... lack of grammar and inconsequence’ – comments unlikely to endear him to the angry young men of the time. The Modernists, in the ascendant after his death, took their revenge. In no sense a Pioneer of Modern Design, Lutyens was pointedly ignored in Pevsner’s teleological tale, An Outline of European Architecture. ‘Our greatest architect ...”