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“... interest, studiously examining the backgrounds of Ceasar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, and extending the discussion to many other plays. He looks for the roots of Shaw’s thinking about history in Carlyle, Macaulay, Nietzsche, Buckle, Marx and others, including John Stuart Stuart-Glennie, a philosopher of history ...”

“... one month and I was not able to read the third. I also read some Eurocommunist writings, books by Roger Garaudy, Cohen’s biography of Bukharin and some copies of New Left Review. R.B.: Why do these questions of Soviet history loom so large in contemporary life? B.K.: In the West things happen very quickly. Before Thatcher or Reagan seems a long time ...”

“... been playing, with, responsible for their suppression, the commissioner of police for Bruges, one Roger de Bris. This gives quiet pleasure as it’s also the name of the transvestite stage director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, who makes his appearance bare-shouldered and in a heavy ball gown. 7 March. Our pillar box is now emptied at 9 a.m. not by the ...”

“... An epigraph to the screenplay of True Romance, attributed to ‘French critics on the films of Roger Corman’, says: ‘His films are a desperate cry from the heart of a grotesque fast-food culture.’ In Tarantino the cry is not desperate, and his characters are capable of quoting this line as a joke. In Natural Born Killers a pretentious film director ...”

“... the document which was to prove the beginning of the end for any hope of autonomy. The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French ...”

“... end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or soil it for ever: for every Nelson Mandela, there is an Aung San Suu Kyi. Greta Thunberg at 16 is one thing, but it is hard to picture her going at it with the same intensity at 45. People get ...”

“... experience. Michael Tanner speaks of its ‘qualifications for religious status’; while for Roger Scruton, Tristan und Isolde offers nothing less than ‘a sacrificial consolation for the imperfect loves of those who witness it’.In the early days, the expressionistic intensity of Tristan und Isolde produced violent reactions in its audiences. The ...”

“... traditional practice – very dusty, it is beginning to seem, as old ‘as history herself’, Roger Aubenas suggested in 1960, and very probably somewhat older than that. Some of the problems that could arise with Bray’s ‘brothers’ had already been revealed by the publication in 1994 of Pierre Chaplais’s studies on Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s ...”

“... been his hundredth birthday in 2012 drew contributions from all the paladins of the Tory right: Roger Scruton, Andrew Roberts, Simon Heffer, Iain Duncan Smith. His stream of long, considered speeches continued to ripple through Tory minds, all the more perhaps because they were now running underground. During his wilderness years Powell became the Baptist ...”

“... House for recommending that schools, churches and businesses move gradually towards reopening. Roger Severino, a Christian evangelist who is now the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, says: ‘Governments have a duty to instruct the public on how to stay safe during this crisis and can absolutely do so ...”

“... job as an articled clerk at a firm of solicitors called Knapp-Fishers, where one of the partners, Roger Maddison, groped her when she was talking on the phone to a client. When she finished the call, he told her off for shrieking. Again, she didn’t tell anyone: ‘it never crossed my mind that complaining would do anything other than make things worse for ...”

“... redoubts. However fleetingly, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Vanessa Bell, Raymond Mortimer, Roger Fry, Vita Sackville-West, Frederick Ashton and the like made Vogue, for a couple of seasons, a contemporary intellectual and artistic touchstone. Still, it ended in tears, perhaps not surprisingly, given Todd’s underlying self-destructiveness and the not ...”

“... Jenny. Diski feels more accurately like me, though it is an entirely invented name to which both Roger-the-Ex and I changed when we got married. There was a gasp and then a brief silence.‘How are you?’I was 11 when she had last known me, but what else was there to say?‘I’m well, thank you.’I explained that I was a writer these days and was thinking ...”

“... his imprisonment) a supplier of controlled substances to the President’s chaotic brother Roger. As in the case of his disordered family and courtship background, so with his amateur experience on the drug scene: once in Washington Bill Clinton proselytises for ‘family values’ and ‘the war on drugs’ with the zeal of a convert. Not since Nixon ...”

“... by John Bayley and by Peter Conrad stand out) but there is one brilliant full-length study, Roger Gard’s Jane Austen’s Novels, that serves as the best possible introduction to her work. And Gard does notice Margaret: he calls her ‘the one completely superfluous figure in Jane Austen’s novels’. He is supported, moreover, by an equally classic ...”