“... 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 ...”

“... the little girl sang, ‘Each morning I am something new ...’ Schwartz’s literary executor, Robert Philips, thinks this is one of Schwartz’s permanent contributions to 20th-century American poetry, but I don’t think he can be serious. There are occasional strikes, such as ‘Mr Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon’, and he never lost his gift for good ...”

“... end of his life Levi was much exercised by the growing denial of the historical fact, famously by Robert Faurisson, but also by children Levi talked to, and the ground of his distress is more crowded and intricate than it looks, and its consequences get more and more troubling. The reason anyone would want to deny the Holocaust and the reason they can are one ...”

“... using various pseudonyms. He wrote the original story for Roman Holiday (1953) and, under the name Robert Rich, earned an Oscar in 1956 for his screenplay The Brave One. He passed on work and encouragement to other victims of the anti-Communist purge and began a vigorous media campaign to end the blacklist. In 1960, Kirk Douglas revealed that Trumbo had ...”

“... of Unionist voters as part of that overall vote. There is also an article by the No-campaigner Robert McCartney, a barrister and UK Unionist MP whom no one in Britain I know has ever heard of. Perhaps that’s because he’s kept the press on their guard with his proven readiness to sue for libel (there was a famous episode in Northern Ireland some years ...”

“... many people left accounts of what she said and did; but it also meant, as her previous biographer, Robert Halsband, has demonstrated, that dubious anecdotes had a habit of attaching themselves to her. Though Grundy attempts to solve the problem of naming by reserving ‘Montagu’ for the literary career and ‘Lady Mary’ for the rest, the variousness of her ...”

“... are Laurence Lerner, Cedric Watts, Roger Scruton, John Holloway, Gabriel Josipovici, Wayne Booth, Robert Pattison and Anthony Thorlby. Four of them teach at Sussex, so I suppose the book started as a bright idea in the Senior Common Room at Falmer. Some of the essays are genial performances. Josipovici obviously likes Barthes’s work, and writes happily of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spell in a Chilean prison to take up a one-sided relationship with a former friend living in Rome. Robert, in the story of the same name, is ‘a black American of indeterminate age with a rather grand manner’ who carries his paintings (and his desperate idealism) around with him in a black tin trunk. We catch our last sight of Pat as he stumbles pointlessly ...”

“... will wish to have this edition. By contrast, Mark Musa’s rendering has something in common with Robert Fitzgerald’s new version of the Aeneid, following his similar productions of the Iliad and Odyssey. Here again the achievement is to involve the common reader in the whole scope and meaning of a poem which has usually been presented to him through the ...”

“... Wren, came along at exactly the moment when he had fully mastered the ‘High Game’. But, as Robert Grant Irving’s fascinating study in the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture makes abundantly clear, there was far more to the making of New Delhi than the design of the buildings. His narrative is dominated by political events ...”

“... comparison with Beckett would be neither irrelevant nor absurd. The French novelist and playwright Robert Pinget was put forward in the 1960s as an exponent of the ‘nouveau roman’. But his affiliation with Beckett was always stronger than the temporary association with Robbe-Grillet’s travelling circus, and Beckett paid him the compliment of making an ...”

“... an unanswered question, so too, does the history of National Socialism – which a book like Robert Harbison’s recent Deliberate Regression: The disastrous history of Romantic individualism in thought and art, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to 20th-century fascism (1980) interprets as dreamfully as Steiner recreates Hitler. The reason why I quote ...”

“... massive, and unquestionably confiscated, correspondence, a remnant of which was acquired by Sir Robert Cotton? Where are the papers of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More? Perhaps the former kept none; the latter, practising his famous discretion, very likely destroyed his in the months during which, still free, he could confidently look forward to his ...”

“... of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the introduction offers a personal reading of the plays which is both interesting and quite unlike the way ...”