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“... essay on a new biography of Daniel Defoe in the Edinburgh Review, where he remarked that in Robinson Crusoe Defoe abandoned the political and religious subjects he addressed in his pamphlets, and confined himself to ‘unsophisticated views of nature and the human heart’. Hazlitt’s misreading is not uncommon. The novel is seen as the archetypal ...”

“... Farewell, Plantagenet! And toll the bell For Mowbray and de Vere. A further knell For Smith and Robinson. Now meet Patel. There’s always a whole new set of things you’re not allowed to laugh at. And now you can’t laugh at newsagents. You can’t snigger at class, or Princess Diana, even if you’re the sort of person who might always have done so. Mr ...”

“... somebody unseen to yell at my guides. A great fuss was made of showing me the library’s Heath Robinson book-retrieval system. I pretended to be impressed but was momentarily dumbfounded by the set of books selected for me: a textbook on neonatal emergencies, The Complete Encyclopedia of Chickens and a copy of Gone with the Wind. I noticed they were all ...”

“... got a hairdressing apprenticeship but was sacked after a few weeks for bunking off to go to a Tom Robinson gig. Boy George deliberately missed all his exams and then refused to join his father’s building firm (‘I painted and decorated myself instead’). In those days, ‘flamboyance and glamour,’ as the artist Nicola Tyson puts it, ‘were under ...”

“... was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his constituency instead of going on the Andrew Marr Show. Later that day he was filmed as he hurried along the pavement outside Westminster in silence, refusing to answer reporters’ questions: it ‘looked like a perp walk’, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian. ‘He isn’t playing the ...”

“... Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon ...”

“... others – sceptical of such fine and confident discriminations – have tried to hold out. Jancis Robinson won’t budge from the traditional 20-point scale, resisting the notion of a single standard of taste: ‘There’s no suggestion that Parker’s not being consistent, and following his taste. This is the whole point of wine – that there are different ...”

“... nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of Contemporary ...”

“... spartan; it’s now a tiny staff room. Jim and Helen barely used it: one of their visitors, Duncan Robinson, remembered their ‘austere, almost invalid evening meal’, sometimes followed by their two indulgences: ‘very dark bitter chocolate, eaten in very small quantities’, and the occasional half bottle of burgundy or claret, kept in a cupboard under ...”

“... as a writer, he was preoccupied with politics. He was almost 60 when he published his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, in 1719. If he had died a year or two earlier, his work would not be on any English literature syllabus. Given that A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain was written even later than his novels, he would probably be entirely unknown to ...”

“... and no reckoning with their own deep violence was ever likely to occur. Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina was due to speak that first day, a black man deeply committed to the happy fiction that Donald Trump and his followers are not at all racist. But Robinson goes the extra mile. He’s a prince of ...”

“... And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and more and more, all well-known and all made new. That shock of the familiar, the celebrity instantly recognisable by the trademark logo that the artist reinvents distinctively as his or her own, defines the genre that Reaves has discovered and ...”

“... to levels that make Billy Connolly’s childhood seem like a chapter from The Swiss Family Robinson. They may be right to feel hunted by the press, but feeling hunted by the press is an aspect of self-hunting too: their famousness is an occasion for grief, and their grief is a constituent part of their fame. The newspapers love abuse stories and they ...”

“... the subject before. Sometimes a cache of new letters adds telling detail in a few areas. Andrew Roberts justifies his new volume on Northcliffe partly by revealing a DNA analysis of descendants of the children brought up by Northcliffe’s mistress Kathleen Wrohan, which suggests that they were not his. Roberts also stresses his good fortune in being ...”

“... of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the findings of a previous inquiry, commissioned by the Labour health minister Andy Burnham and intended ‘primarily to give those most affected by poor care an opportunity to tell their stories’. Many such stories had ...”