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“... a pass than to bring them to bed. He may have yearned to face danger during the war as his friends Robert Kee and Paddy Leigh-Fermor did, but he made it impossible to do so. Having somehow survived basic training in the Guards depot at Caterham, he was sent to Sandhurst as an officer cadet. He lay in the three-tonner apparently incapably drunk, but as it ...”

“... and the human touch which made him such a fine teacher. The long list of his pupils runs from Robert Kee at Magdalen in the Thirties to Kathy Burk, the last of his postgraduate students, in the Seventies. But a survey of the many historians he taught would show that in various respects they did not agree with Alan Taylor or indeed with one ...”

“... in Michael Collins. None matters much to me nor, it seems, have any mattered to the Irish public. Robert Kee put it well when he wrote that the film’s intentions were honest and its central themes ‘historically wholly acceptable’. Not for the first time, however, Kee is in a minority position. The film’s ...”

“... commonly posed or faked, to its over-simplistic headlines and its unintentional absurdities. Robert Kee’s The World We Left Behind shows that one can make up an interesting and agreeable book almost solely from this source. It isn’t ‘social history’, since, as it moves from 1 January 1939 to 31 December, it is largely concerned with ...”

“... under way in Britain, with contributions by Yorkshire Television, Lords Devlin and Scarman, and Robert Kee. Irish public opinion, provincial to the last, finally fell in behind its UK counterpart. What is most unexpected about the Hill and Conlon books, perhaps, is the intensity of their descriptions of prison life. Innocence may sharpen the memory: at ...”

“... children and sell the paintings off the walls in amorous pursuit of first, the then undergraduate Robert Kee and second, the egomaniacal and usually drunken Dylan Thomas. Even thirty years later, Taylor recalled this period as ‘a decade of intense, almost indescribable misery’, and it is impossible to contemplate the blighted hopes and bewildered ...”

“... the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke ...”

“... but, she stated, this was all false. Nothing of this type had ever occurred. The interviewer, Robert Kee, did not probe this statement at all. Instead he told Mrs Gandhi that she had proved many times over her right to be called a democrat. So literature can, and perhaps must, give the lie to official facts. But is this a proper function of those of ...”

“... more crazy if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. This is quoted in Robert Kee’s 1945 – The World We Fought For. Kee’s method is to construct an account of the year from contemporary newspapers and journals. Its vice is that it can look rather lazily tacked together. Its virtue is ...”

“... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others ...”

“... last year: Chris Mullin’s on the Birmingham case, Paul Foot’s on the Bridgewater case and then Robert Kee’s* on the Guildford case. Kee’s is a drier, less passionate book than the other two, partly because its prose is more visibly marked by the size-12 footprints of the libel lawyer. Once again we have a crime ...”

“... 1960s, the comic-book landscape was being altered by the ‘underground comix’ movement, led by Robert Crumb. Among Crumb’s most popular creations are the suave adventurer Fritz the Cat (whose conquests include a female ostrich and his own sister) and Mr Natural, a fountainhead of exasperatingly vague advice, outfitted in a Tolstoyan beard and ...”