“... by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen ...”

“... his great eyes without thoughtUnder the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,That insolent fiend Robert ArtissonTo whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler broughtBronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.There is a regular iambic metre hiding in the first line, like a ghost or a well-behaved child, but almost anyone is going to read the initial phrase with ...”

“... Keats walked this coast he felt it followed him,’ I said. But our plans involved Robert Burns. Karl, since he first began publishing Seamus in the New Statesman in the 1960s, always felt there was a clear affinity between Burns and Heaney. They were both the sons of farmers and they both allowed nature to oxygenate the mind and inflect the ...”

“... It was reading Robert Lowell that brought me to poetry at the age of 19, in 1976. I had borrowed a friend’s omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, and something in me said: ‘This is it!’ I don’t remember the poem I first had that response to, but most likely it was in Part IV of Life Studies, ‘Dunbarton’ or ‘For Sale’, or perhaps ‘Waking in the Blue ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”

“... day: twilight or midnight. The time of the full moon appears to be important to them. According to Robert Kirk, the 17th-century minister and author of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, which recorded the spiritual beliefs of his parishioners in the Highlands, fairies changed their lodgings on the quarter days of the year. Kirk’s ...”

“... painted in Rome in 1622. The daughter of a Christian Circassian chieftain, she had married Robert Shirley in Persia and is shown draped in a kind of tent of gold fabric – the effect of her clothes is splendidly exotic. Her thin-lipped, quizzical half-smile is less contrived than those of many of the court beauties. Clothes like hers offer a break ...”

“... and weather wasn’t naturalised here. Between the wars Pissarro was close to Charles Ginner, Robert Bevan, Sickert, Spencer Gore, painters well represented in the Ashmolean. There is a pleasing primness about them, a neatness, a care about getting the drawing right, that was just what Camille hoped Lucien would escape from. In 1947 Pissarro’s widow and ...”

“... as Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney, and more than twice as long as Wilfred Owen, Charles Sorley, Robert Graves and Wyndham Lewis.’ It isn’t a competition, but his long acquaintance with the front is probably why the matter-of-fact tone of In Parenthesis – one tone among several – is so free of affectation. In the 1960s, Jones visited Sassoon, another ...”

“... perfectly obvious. Somebody is – perfectly legally – trying to rip us off. George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s new book, Phishing for Phools (Princeton, £16.95), is about this subject. It concerns, as its subtitle says, ‘the economics of manipulation and deception’. Akerlof and Shiller aren’t using the word ‘phishing’ in the sense in which ...”

“... some living artists. The title of the current exhibition, The Shock of the Old (an allusion to Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New, about the rise of modern art since Impressionism), is playfully intended to convey the provocation of exhibiting such paintings among the contemporary work on view nearby, at edgier dealers like Pace and Marlborough ...”

“... plans for a new Bedlam, since by the early 1800s the baroque palace of an asylum, designed by Robert Hooke, had fallen into serious disrepair. Matthews’s designs – elegant and neoclassical – were passed over, and the great grey superstructure of the new Bedlam arose at St George’s Fields in Southwark instead, topped off by the weirdly elongated ...”

“... shop-shelves, montages of violent action from Cuban history and the Spanish Civil War (including Robert Capa’s famous photo of a dying soldier). The base at Guantánamo Bay opens, or rather encloses itself. Sergio is confused. ‘Everything is the same,’ he says, looking around him. And then: ‘I have changed, and the city has changed.’ He quotes a ...”

“... on headphones as you walk around) has echoes of Untrue Island, a libretto from 2012 written by Robert Macfarlane at the request of the National Trust. Here is Macfarlane:Listen. Listen now. Listen again to the sounds of this slow-flowing shingle river. Listen to the voices of this untrue island. Listen to the Ness: it speaks gull, it speaks wave, it speaks ...”

“... of Northumbria in a child’s grave, Viking crosses with their round faces like a cowl. The dying Robert the Bruce came here on his last pilgrimage, hoping to find some time-crossing connection with the saint. Pilgrimages and festivals intertwine. There is a well-accepted anthropological framework for the festival process: the initial rites of separation from ...”