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“... and an old sideboard hand-decorated by my mother. The animal was killed by my great-uncle, Robin Meek, and a local huntsman, Belli, in the Nilgiri hills in southern India in 1931. Originally – that is, when I was a child – the leopard was in two parts, the skin and the head. The skin was backed with felt, the legs splayed out, the claws still ...”

“... regarded books on Dostoevsky. Plots is a version of a series of lectures he gave in 2011, and Robin Feuer Miller, in a witty and affectionate introduction, describes the printed book as a last work of a special kind: ‘How typical of Belknap to produce a magnum opus that is particular, profound, original and short.’ This is a magnum opus with no ...”

“... or Venus, who used it to put her husband to sleep. Rascasse, a scorpion fish also known as a sea robin, is a typical ingredient of bouillabaisse: the venom in the spines of its dorsal fin becomes inert when cooked. I had several questions for that friend the night before I drove to Marseille. How, for example, to get to the Château d’If, where enemies of ...”

“... her period of seclusion, she begins a grotesque photo-essay: a series of stills of dead animals (robin, rabbit, rat, mouse, rook, fox, frog, hare, hedgehog, badger), each of which provides the title for one of the novel’s ten chapters. Many of these grainy photographs are reproduced in the book; Frankie knows they’re not very good. Even the ...”

“... gag in the otherwise rather desultory Deconstructing Harry (1997). A character, played by Robin Williams, has blurred features and soft edges, which are at first attributed to a faulty lens, but then turn out to be just the way he is. A temporary condition, he hopes. His initial response is to get some rest. Later his wife and children equip ...”

“... of Hobbs’s previous books, Doing the Business, contained the helpful observation that the only Robin Hoods in East London were pubs and he brings the same sardonic approach to this account of ne’er-do-wells and worse. He opens with perhaps the most inviting come-on line of any recent book about crime: ‘The idea for this book began when several people ...”

“... she recommends has important implications: in his biography, Pushkin: The Man and His Age (1994), Robin Edmonds strong-mindedly refrains from even attempting to introduce Pushkin’s poetry to readers who have no Russian, and helpfully fobs us off with the diplomatic and historical background of Pushkin’s life. Feinstein also mentions David Magarshack’s ...”

“... come from ancient pictures of the Palestine that died long ago’. The original bridge, built in wood and iron, is a part of that vanished past. It was completed in 1918 by the Royal Engineers (Allenby had conquered Palestine in 1917) and destroyed in 1946 by a few well-trained Palmach men laying explosives. The Night of the Bridges was a Haganah exercise ...”

“... country that had taken in the refugee from Nazi Austria. Someone had to counter the flab and dead wood, and there was at that time no denunciation from within. Nevertheless, it’s possible to feel that the energy of aggression, the sheer blood-lust, was in excess of the necessary. There is a parallel with Leavis: an outsider (though native-born) equally ...”

“... airA high stream-roof that moved in silence overRhododendrons in full bloom, foxglovesAnd hemlock, robin-run-the-hedge, the hedgeWith its deckled ivy and thick shadows ...This new verse has got beyond proving things, and is just a sweet engine for the propulsion of its lines. Heaney has never sounded quite like this before – his syncopated repetition of ...”

“... who might have understood it was Rousseau, who stands Janus-faced at the edge of the Enlightenment wood. As author of the ‘Project for the Constitution of Corsica’, which proposes an ‘exact policemanship of the forests’, he is the incarnation of his age; in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and the Bois de Boulogne passage of the Confessions ...”

“... Lecoq and Sherlock Holmes. However, this Master of Crime edition also casts him in a new role. Robin Walz’s introduction puts paid to the notion that Vidocq was a Victorian Robin Hood: ‘In Vidocq the criminal and detective are one. He was the world’s first anti-hero rogue cop.’ The editor’s preface ...”

“... offshoot of Cotabato Manobo, a language unrelated to T’boli, the tongue of the surrounding area. Robin Hemley’s book is a brave and wholly convincing attempt to find the truth concerning the ‘anthropological fraud of the century’. These days, and certainly in the Philippines, the received opinion is that the Tasaday were unquestionably a hoax ...”

“... although, as Kwass points out, Farm agents themselves often adulterated their product with wood shavings, ashes, pulverised brick or even plain dirt. But Mandrin was selling his tobacco at a steep discount, and it went quickly. The gang carried out a military review of sorts in the square before leaving town. Mandrin was on his way to becoming a folk ...”

“... variety). An unexpected addition was a vicious belt of torturing metal sticking out of the wood a little above waist height. This was both a better and a worse encounter than you might be imagining. Better, because this particular instrument of execution was only a prop on a film set of ancient Rome, (re-)built near Hammamet in Tunisia. It had been ...”