“... garden of Ruth’s childhood home. It is a huge, dilapidated structure, in whose sinister pit the young child was placed by her father (‘To cool me off’); it is also the place where the father was neglected and left to die, after a shooting accident, by his implacable wife. But when the ‘ice-house’ returns metamorphosed, as a tomb in the Egyptian ...”

“... concerned – one of the lightest-fingered authors living). In this case, the borrowings are from Robert Aldrich’s Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and John Fowles’s The Collector. A best-selling author, Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken body is rescued by an eccentric ...”

“... in a school-yard, remembering taunts of long ago. (One of his cleverest poems, ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’, is a tribute to the skills, social, psychological and physical, developed by the world’s heavyweights.) At school, works by Australian writers disappeared from the curriculum once senior classes were reached and the study became ...”

“... Slugging it out with Diana Trilling in the pages of Commentary, Robert Lowell remarked: ‘Controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.’ Mrs Trilling, for all the world like Dorothea Brooke or some other 19th-century heroine of the strenuously examined life, replied: ‘I have never thought controversy bad for either the mind or the heart ...”

“... spoke of his messiah complex and noted his ‘sharp eyes looking out of the same austere mask’. Robert Payne (a profound observer of wartime China, whose books are now forgotten) described Chiang’s face as ‘always the same: calm, detached, unemotional’. The problem has always been how to penetrate the mask. Early contemporaries speak of Chiang’s ...”

“... London and Puritan Cambridge. From 1571 he was a scholar of Pembroke Hall, along with the young Edmund Spenser, under its Puritan master William Fulke, and he effortlessly took on the colouring of his Cambridge environment. He was a valued member of a formidably learned biblical seminar conducted by the leading university Puritans, and the godly of ...”

“... included in Stranger Shores (2001), opens: ‘Born in the autumn years of the Habsburg Empire, Robert Musil served His Imperial and Royal Majesty in one bloody continental convulsion and died halfway through the even worse convulsion that followed.’ A Musil piece in Inner Workings, which takes up some material from the earlier essay ...”

“... occasionally dangerous, peopled by ghosts – miners’ wives or the wandering monks who capture Robert Macfarlane’s imagination in the opening pages of his book. Our push and shove with the land is far from over; in fact you might consider the whole present consumerist extravaganza to be rage against the land, the ties that bind.All of this is preliminary ...”

“... time she had seen her mother, she insisted that Ida wear a comb to make her look more ‘like a young woman’. On the Auschwitz ramp, she speculates, it made her look old enough for a work-detail. There are a few more such testimonies. But the Shoah is by and large represented here neither in first-person accounts of the camps nor in pictures of its worst ...”

“... her Catriona; would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely ...”

“... Patel, would have had to go for being officially found guilty of bullying her staff; so would Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, for a ripe lobbying scandal.As for policymaking, a concern for accuracy was supposed to go hand in hand with a thorough and detailed examination of pros and cons, a proper submission of papers and keeping of records, rather ...”

“... Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put ...”

“... also in the Paris suburbs, and attracted an audience a third of the size. There were many more young people – most of them men (and many maskless) – at Zemmour’s rally than you see at meetings held by the established political parties. Almost all of them were white and looked like they came from Paris’s posher areas. They were not the progeny of ...”

“... provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter’s national security ...”

“... in the playhouse, a contention that is sustained by her discussion of a group of works, including Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, that ‘invite us to align a young prince or king’s inward/inland reformation with a sense of England’s readiness, as an island nation, to do battle’. This bypasses the ...”