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“... And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in pretending to help people ...”

“... to discover the Counter-Reformation is a very old one, first advanced by the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Parsons. In a lengthy memorandum he composed in the 1590s, sketching out a reform agenda should Elizabeth be succeeded by a Catholic, Parsons suggested that Mary’s attempt to reimpose Catholicism had failed because it was ‘huddled’ and ‘shuffled up ...”

“... end – or their end. Four of them – Blunden, Owen, Read and Sassoon – won the Military Cross. Robert Graves’s hard saying might stand as their watchword: ‘the only way out of the war is the way through it.’ Intellectually, they had much in common with pacifist Bloomsbury, but they had bound themselves to a separate caste and remained faithful to its ...”

“... on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those cowboy hats from the States in 1900 when he was kitting out his nurses and constables in Africa. B.P. has recorded: ‘They were known in the trade as “Boss of the Plains” or ...”

“... in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his Selected Poems, ‘Nineteen Thirties’, 25 poems formerly scattered and now finding the arc they were meant for – on all these and on much else (Yeats’s fascism, and ...”

“... out of lives, or even out of Plutarchan parallel lives, which, as in the case of Hitler and D.H. Lawrence, Gerhardie rather enjoys. There are interwoven chapters on Margot Tennant, the Kaiser (‘the greatest ass of the last half-century to wear a crown’), Lenin and Chekhov, Bismarck, Curzon, Balfour, Tolstoy, Wilde, Proust, a couple of Czars, and so ...”

“... drew a decidedly crisp letter from Lady Mosley, who called it ‘fanciful in the extreme’. As Robert Skidelsky said of the meeting in his Oswald Moslev: ‘The number of future memoir writers and Labour politicians in the audience alone ensured that it would be talked about for years to come.’ There were also a hundred angry busmen present, out for ...”

“... have? Even Freud was able to get this much maths right in his famous remark to Fliess (cited by Lawrence Durrell at the start of The Alexandria Quartet and also here by Garber): ‘You are certainly right about bisexuality. I am also getting used to regarding every sexual act as one between four individuals.’ (Garber presents a lively history of the ...”

“... captive by Iraqis, the chances were high that he would be raped. (One presumes nobody told T.E. Lawrence to ‘remember that in 75 per cent of cases when you are male-raped, you will get an erection or ejaculate. Do not worry about that . . . it does not mean that you are gay.’) In September 2003 he touched down in Basra, where he was frantically ...”

“... by that of their mother and they represented a form of capital accumulation for slave owners. Robert Wedderburn, a radical agitator and Unitarian preacher, provides one of the few voices articulating the sense of loss, bitterness and anger aroused by these ugly practices of power. His pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery, written as an act of restitution to ...”

“... of brilliant achievement in painting’ – in the secure hands of William Orpen, Laura Knight and Robert Anning Bell. (Now that Modernism is orthodoxy, we forget how marginal its initial hold was.) When, after the war and a period of personal troubles, Sickert returned to the critical fray, he had become the genial, roguish grandfather of art, indulgently ...”

“... at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there are errors in our account – given the habits of secrecy and misinformation which prevail among British governments it could perhaps hardly be otherwise – but what ...”

“... When Hotel Bedroom appeared in London, destined for the Venice Biennale, the catalogue essay by Robert Melville said of Freud, among many other offensive things: ‘in England we look upon him as the finest of our living primitives. His art has the exquisite laboriousness of Sunday painting relentlessly pursued throughout the week.’ When the critic and ...”

“... I dwell,’ and you see why the line disgusted a generation that valued irony and understatement. Robert Lowell told Spender that the line should be ‘I would think continually of those who are truly great’ because, as he patiently explained, ‘one cannot think of the great all the time, though one may wish to do so’; but the line, with its illogic and ...”

“... because they simply cannot go on. We are now entering a period of rapid transition’ (Felicity Lawrence, Eat Your Heart Out, 2008). ‘We depend just as much on our gas-guzzling, chilled plug-in, “just-in-time” food deliveries as ancient Romans did on foreign conquests, shipping and slaves – and our food system is no more secure, ethical or ...”