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“... unexplained scandal which Colonel North tactfully forgets to mention. Clark’s replacement was Robert ‘Bud’ McFarlane, whom North resented and at every possible occasion sought to discomfort and displace. His real hero was CIA director Casey, who suffered from what his predecessor Richard Helms called Fingerspitzengefühl – ‘a feel for the ...”

“... He has created​ more than any artist after Picasso,’ Jasper Johns said of Robert Rauschenberg, his one-time partner, and the Rauschenberg retrospective now at Tate Modern (until 2 April) fully attests to the sheer abundance of his six-decade career (he died in 2008). There are impressive inventions here, such as his extravagant combinations of painting, collage and sculpture, as well as mixed experiments, such as his rambunctious forays into new media technologies, but there is a lot of recycling and wheel-spinning too ...”

“... also used this column to attack Paul Foot for writing both in Private Eye and in a paper owned by Robert Maxwell, Private Eye’s enemy. In his book, he explains that the magazine is ‘particularly suspicious of those of East European origin’ and, with reference to another enemy, James Goldsmith, ‘there was also the Jewish question ... The picture ...”

“... Robert Grosseteste, scientist, theologian and bishop, is rather like the elephant that was interpreted so differently by the various blind men. Even in his lifetime men had contrasting opinions of him: Matthew Paris, who must have known him well, called him at one time ‘heartless and inhuman’, and at another ‘liberal, urbane, cheerful, affable ...”

“... having theories about how to read books than about how to understand his friends. The Foreword to Robert M. Adams’s The Land and Literature of England gives some indication that this merely humane view of literature is now felt to be under threat. His bland intention is ‘to set forth the outlines of English history so that they may serve as background for ...”

“... In 1979 Robert Penn Warren – novelist, critic, and dean of American poets – returned to his native Todd County, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son – Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress ...”

“... weaves together the lives of the famous, the obscure and the forgotten. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning plan their elopement. Samuel Rogers entertains the Gräfin Hahn-Hahn, a romantic novelist who has come to meet her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a ...”

“... It seems that the likes of Edward Larocque Tinker, Robert P. Swierenga and Colonel John S. ‘Rip’ Ford have all made valuable contributions to our knowledge of the cowboy world, and Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas* sets out to illuminate the structures and processes behind the historical underpinning behind those who wear spurs ...”

“... which seems closer to the mark. Perhaps the Penguin compilers should also have reached for their Robert and looked up the French verb blairer, as in je ne peux pas le blairer (‘he gives me the creeps’). Those easily offended should on no account read the following quote: This was not a young man making love to a girl. This was the meeting of twin ...”

“... heavy drinking and writing was forged. When I thought of poetry I thought of drink. There was Robert Burns, after all, and his skirling, birling Tam O’Shanter. There was Hugh MacDiarmid and his drunk man looking at the thistle. And there were all those Scots poets meeting in Milne’s Bar in Edinburgh, pouring whisky down their necks and poison in one ...”

“... The institutions of culture dignify their exhibits: as James anticipated, they can make ‘even Robert Browning lose a portion of the bristling surface of his actuality’. Big editions, such as the still far from complete Longman Poems, or the Oxford Poetical Works (now up to Volume IX), or the rather less authoritative Ohio Complete Works (now up to ...”

“... the joys of love to me and you. It stimulates the young child-murderer too. Bad News in April 1981 Robert Garioch, the best poet in Scotland, is dead. The wit stops coming from that remarkable singing head. A Rough Ballad of Old Chicago Hemingway was a Wound-and-the-Bow writer but his mother thought he was a low writer and all that Oak Park puritan set ...”

“... Then morning comes, saying: ‘This was a night.’ Robert Lowell Broken knights. – No, not like that. Well, no matter. Something agreeably Tennysonian (is there Any other kind?) About ‘broken knights’. Sir Bors and Sir Bedivere. In my one-piece pyjamas – My it doesn’t matter suit, With necessarily non-matching – Matchless, makeless, makeles – Added top, I pad Downstairs to look At the green time On the digital microwave ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another ...”

“... you would hardly think so from his portrait. The earliest dateable likeness is the engraving by Robert Vaughan, done in the mid 1620s, when Jonson was around fifty. The face is jowly, bearded, dour, heavily lived-in. The shadowed eyes remind me of photos of Tony Hancock. Comedy, they seem to say, is no laughing matter. It was one of Jonson’s sayings that ...”