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“... for much speculation of this kind, but his Teutonic thoroughness, rendered into lucid English by Michael Robertson, does marvellous justice to his materials. He has even dug out Erich Fromm’s great-grandfather, who would sit in his shop all day deep in the Talmud, and when a customer entered ask him whether he couldn’t find another shop to go to. If ...”

“... some Durex, you let him fuck you. – He was kind of lonesome, as the words go. Litany For Robin Robertson Dear god,         let me remember these months of transition in a room on the Harrow Road, the traffic muffled by a plastic sheet, the facing ziggurats with their satellite dishes and tea-towels out to dry, a lengthwise Brazilian flag curtaining ...”

“... history, save by a handful of historians of the trial who have written him off as a hack. Geoffrey Robertson has set out to rescue him from the enormous disregard of posterity, and from the ignominy of his death in 1660 by hanging, drawing and quartering. Robertson is a practising barrister and has served as the president of ...”

“... not between ‘Westerners’ and ‘Easterners’ – between those who believed with Haig and Robertson that the war could only be won on the Western Front and those, like Lloyd George and Churchill, who believed in ‘knocking away the props’ – but between those who believed in a traditional British strategy of minimal military and maximal economic ...”

“... is looser in style and the tone is now more personal, there is a lingering coolness. Like Michael Hofmann, Greenlaw has a fondness for paired, unexpected adjectives delivered in a clipped prose-like manner: ‘This privacy is teenage,/collective’; ‘The hill has its nightlife, amiable, averted’. Rather like the quasi-journalistic ethos of ...”

“... Norway, though 48 years ago for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and Robin Robertson, or the Irishman John F. Deane, or now the American Patty Crane. They were drawn by the small vocabulary, the short sentences, the largely transferable word-order, the language that seems to pay twenty shillings to the pound ...”

“... totally non-conducting tortoise-shell glasses’ and accompanied by ‘a friend, inevitably called Michael, who said not a single word and contented himself with selections from his repertoire of ravishing smiles, which ranged from a slow, dreamy unfolding of the subconscious to brilliant flashes of amused recognition when one of the two American dowagers ...”

“... an elaborate trap. Using actors pretending to be businessmen, the programme-makers approached Sir Michael Grylls, long-standing Tory MP for North-West Surrey, and introduced themselves as agents for a firm which wanted to smuggle art treasures out of Russia. As a cover for their enterprise, they explained, they wanted to buy a government agency, preferably ...”

“... and international judges. Earlier this year, the tribunal ruled that its president, Geoffrey Robertson QC, could not participate in cases concerning the rebels because of condemnations he had published prior to becoming a judge. It is difficult to imagine the Iraqi special tribunal taking similar steps to ensure the reality and appearance of ...”

“... in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); Michael Anesko in ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986); Rayburn Moore in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 (1990). There’s ...”

“... new, since the genius behind the Tories in 2015 is Lynton Crosby, who was also the genius behind Michael Howard’s campaign in 2005 (that was the ‘dog-whistle’ campaign, with carefully provocative posters attached to the slogan, ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’). Crosby’s return reminded me of the Private Eye joke about Peter ...”

“... Coalition founder (and one-time candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination) Pat Robertson. A giant meteor and a mile-high tsunami destroy Los Angeles in his 1995 The End of the Age, leaving survivalists to battle Satan (now President of the United States) and his billion Third World minions. Consider as a magical dystopian example Davis’s ...”

“... too rollicking either. In his preface to the new Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Ritchie Robertson says the novels ‘were often understood with dutiful awe as intellectual fiction of a high order, top-heavy with German philosophy and history’, and continues: ‘Over-attention to this aspect of Mann’s fiction often distracted readers, especially ...”

“... with almost breathless admiration, Auden’s commendation of ‘the necessary murder’. Ritchie Robertson is concise and authoritative on the Zionist impulse in Herzl and Roth. The difficulty, however, is this: in its Bismarckian model, in its espousal of 19th-century nationalism, the Zionist blueprint was almost antithetical to modernity, to the ...”

“... based on England, from Early Modern times until practically the end of the second millennium. John Robertson’s collection of academic studies examines the origins of the Union’s most important axis, the Parliamentary unification of Scotland and England in 1707. Lindsay Paterson’s long polemical essay looks at the consequences of that for the Scots: a ...”