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“... any more. The unpretentious manner creates a sense of authenticity. And this is reinforced by the Robinson Crusoe-like episodes of clearing the virgin bush and establishing a farm. This was the activity of Facey’s early years: clearing, fencing, preparing the ground. After escaping from the family of rustlers, Bert goes off to work for other impoverished ...”

“... has been marked by a belligerent stance towards opponents, whether at home or abroad – as Mary Robinson discovered when she dared to criticise his Government for human-rights violations in Chechnya. His brutal suppression of that independence movement and his renouncing of the no-first-strike principle of Russian nuclear strategy provided clear indications ...”

“... of beauty and genius. The autodidact poets discussed by Bridget Keegan – Ann Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Henry Headley and later John Clare – were all of one mind about this. Chatterton, they thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here ...”

“... protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of the ...”

“... who resemble one another: the devout Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein/IRA and the devout Peter Robinson, a Loyalist leader who has gained in clout since the programme. There will be those who think that the new Robinson is partly due to the fact that, in the programme that was eventually transmitted, the public was ...”

“... were funny; he describes a ‘concussion forum’ at Twickenham in 2013 at which a doctor called Michael Turner played videos of jockeys falling on their heads, to laughs. One strand of the book follows the story of Jeff Astle, a former professional footballer who developed early-onset dementia and whose family have since campaigned for awareness of the link ...”

“... look like a meliorist fabliau, the banal acquisition of knick-knacks, a kind of Norwegian Family Robinson, animated chiefly by its inveterate suspicion of women. Independent People by contrast is remarkably unconsoled and unconsoling, a book full of deaths and calamities and unhappy persistence, a book with real rain in it, and real cold and real turf ...”

“... apart from Roy Jenkins, the other heroes are the usually unsung civil servants: Lee, O’Neill, Robinson, Butler, Palliser etc, who shepherded us into the Community with a skill and persistence which almost made up for the visionless complacency of their predecessors of the 1930s and 1940s. Young is impressed by Heath’s ability at their crucial meeting in ...”

“... of ‘likely’ journalists. Wright was, in the immortal words of his former colleague Neville Robinson, an ‘ignorant shit’. So it was perfectly possible for him and his colleagues to spread among gullible journalists the ‘fact’ that half the Cabinet were secret Communists, or that Healey and Benn had jointly written a pamphlet calling for more ...”

“... The funicular railway takes you to the top of the mountain with the strange name: a nonsense word, a child’s burble, Tibidabo. You see the city of Barcelona spread out beneath you; beyond it the Mediterranean. Très beau panorama, the Michelin guide says, as well it may, since the name is not the nonsense word it looks but the Devil’s Latin, part of the sentence in which he offered to Christ the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me, ‘All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me ...”

“... through a Reuters ticker. This Man Reuter, a popular wartime Hollywood film, starring Edward G. Robinson, boosted the company’s fame. Hitler learned that Himmler was suing for peace from the Reuters machine in his bunker, which told him the game was up. Nasser found the Reuters file admirably objective during the Suez crisis. President Kennedy first heard ...”

“... Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (1964). A couple of years later, she almost played Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, a perfect piece of casting sabotaged by Gardner’s self-doubt and reluctance to strip. She was in many bad or dull films, though she also made some good ones, notably Pandora, Mogambo (1953), The Barefoot Contessa, Bhowani Junction ...”

“... Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel,* which Michael McKeon energetically bids to transcend, gave us, whatever else, the clear image and serviceable concept: ‘formal realism’, the growth of ‘the middle class’, secularised Protestant Man proudly bearing the standard of an aggressive ‘individualism’ – on Crusoe’s hard-won island as in the socioeconomic landscape of contemporary England ...”

“... introduction to the poem, published for the first time in 2015 by the Perdika Press, Peter Robinson suggests that to issue such a piece in the homophobic 1950s might well have proved ‘controversial’. The homoerotic charge Ashbery detected in Prince’s early poems is often what makes their Yeatsian rhetoric suddenly catch fire, driving the poem ...”

“... problem of free choice.The Green pulpit can descend to quite low levels of abuse, but Marilynne Robinson’s Mother Country is witty as well as vicious. It combines ghoulish glee over the horrors of plutonium manufactured in Sellafield and dispersed along the Cumbrian coast, with satire against the quaint insincerities of the British. Her comic touch is so ...”