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“... to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy derived from the paternal authority that Adam and subsequent biblical fathers exercised over their families and servants.More recently, scholars have slightly qualified Laslett’s findings, pushing the ...”

“... not impossible, and if you were a military man your uniform coat would announce the fact. Colonel Gordon is dressed in full Highland costume: kilt, plaid and stockings all in the Huntly tartan, perhaps specially woven in silk to suit the Roman climate. ‘Portrait of Sir Humphry Morice’, (1761-62) Portraits like these form a substantial part of the ...”

“... revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might recoil. (Though it’s fascinating to speculate what might have happened if Rahv and Mary McCarthy had made a go of it; a marriage ...”

“... on a garment’ form the main interest of this erudite, entertaining and well-illustrated book. Robert Ward has made painstaking and profitable use of the vast mass of archival material in the Public Record Office (because of the Stuart kings’ involvement), the London Metropolitan Archives (which hold a vast amount of material from all the old water ...”

“... More important so far as his literary development is concerned was his meeting in 1917 with Eric Gordon Tombe, of whom he wrote: ‘In mental development I owe more to him than to any other person who has entered my life.’ Tombe was only four years older, a clergyman’s son who had worked as a motor mechanic in Stoke Newington; but to Wheatley he passed ...”

“... have been a staple of the non-fiction novel, from Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song to Gordon Burn’s horribly fascinating books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West. Andrew Hankinson’s new book dramatises the last days of Raoul Moat, the Newcastle bouncer and bodybuilder who in July 2010 shot his former partner, Samantha ...”

“... examples of this self-serving tendency, while supplying plenty from the 18th century. Sir Robert Walpole, effective prime minister from 1722 to 1742, was both joyously corrupt and a ruthless exponent of one-party government, yet he seems genuinely to have believed that all expressions of hostility to his protracted regime stemmed not from a sense of ...”

“... Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian Cosgrove. Several get prizes, and in particular Andrew Motion gets the big one, £5,000, for a poem that either is, or successfully ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...”

“... not to mention new EC rules on such things as competition and public purchasing. Moreover, as Robert Reich has argued, capital is now so international and cosmopolitan that it is meaningless for governments to concentrate solely on supporting national capital. There is no obvious reason why the US Government should spend its energy advocating greater ...”

“... remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter Mandelson was communications director, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election – was on the long march to respectability and another defeat in 1992. That defeat didn’t breathe new life into the left. It ...”

“... not denounce Nazi crimes without also denouncing Bolshevik crimes. Instead, he resorted to what Robert Ventresca characterises as ‘formulaic appeals to universal peace and brotherhood, and demands that the belligerents respect the rules of war’. The pope believed that informed hearers would recognise the targets of these generalisations well enough. And ...”

“... terrorists by the same method. Streep appears again in Lions for Lambs (2007), directed by Robert Redford, another decent liberal movie but interminably talky. She is a long-time journalist interviewing Tom Cruise as the rising star of the uncertain Republican Party. Redford is a weary but devoted college professor trying to awaken idealism in what he ...”

“... of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies from his parents and getting away with not paying his debts, while the world at large remembers him for pictures showing him in a police van ...”

“... reading the newspapers of the time can have something of the same effect, as is well conveyed by Robert Kee’s The World We Left behind. But it’s not the same as a single person’s day-by-day account of – not, of course, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but – what it eigentlich felt like to that person. The dilemma is whether publication should or ...”