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“... of the Evita myth as he sees them: 1. She rose like a meteor. 2. She died young. 3. She was the Robin Hood of the Forties. 4. Perón loved her madly. 5. For many people, touching Evita was touching the stars. 6. What could be called ‘the story of the gifts’. 7. The unfinished monument. The story of the gifts is the legend ‘every Peronist ...”

“... The pale child gives a faint wave of his hand. He is saying goodbye to his Jewish friend, about to be taken from school to die in Auschwitz, but there is also a whole history of helplessness in the gesture: not only the boy’s but that of his class and time and culture and place. The gesture occurs at the end of Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, 1987 – the year of the story is 1944 – but it has echoes and relatives everywhere in French films since the war, and in French fiction of the same period ...”

“... faeces of the same buzzing red glutton’. Bathsheba Everdene, gazing at the corpses of Fanny Robin and her dead baby, sees ‘the plump backs of its little fists’, and is reminded of ‘the soft convexity of mushrooms on a dewy morning’. ‘They say he can talk French as fast as a maid can eat blackberries,’ a farm-worker says of Clym ...”

“... of C.S. Lewis’s distasteful Narnia series, in which a wardrobe gives onto an extraterrestrial wood. The central characters in Lewis’s religious fantasies are a lot of dead children – a motif we might have expected to find discarded by the 1950s. Kingsley, writing in 1862, had used it to better effect. Macdonald himself, in Lilith, invented a country ...”

“... Robin Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other words, don’t just write for the trade ...”

“... or those of the ci-devant landowners, give rise to small-scale conflicts. One or two Provençal Robin Hoods express the frustration of the peasants and resist the great landowners who want to protect their woodlands from poachers and woodcutters. In the realm of spirits, vine-growers attack the rats-de-cave, government officials who collect taxes on ...”

“... the way this lostness plays into the lives of the others. Denise gets involved in an affair with Robin, the wife of the guy who owns her restaurant, and a failure to prove herself as a keen progenitor of family values relates her (as they are all related) to the moral and economic exigencies of her day. This is a novel about corrections in the family, but ...”

“... near-sighted, young Bucky loved to sail and invented a new kind of oar. His childhood hero was Robin Hood, perhaps because his father’s death had impoverished the family. When he reached Harvard, he was snubbed by his wealthier classmates, cut classes, squandered his allowance by inviting a line of chorus girls to dinner, and was thrown out twice. After ...”

“... tour of duty – were known as ‘Grandads’. I was forced to do all their washing, chop all the wood, and clean the whole camp – I never got more than three hours sleep a night. One of the things I had to do was to fetch the water from the stream. One morning I had a strong instinct not to go – I felt that the mujaheddin had been about that ...”

“... its shuttered finish. This was painstaking: ‘Air bubbles which naturally cling to the rough wood texture needed to be knocked loose by vibrating the wet concrete mechanically after it was poured but before it set, but not too vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the ...”

“... his occasional quotations from Wordsworth. A famous photograph shows him in country clothes with a robin perched on his hat. This lifelong rusticity led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime minister in 1905, Henry Campbell-Bannerman was reluctant to make Grey foreign secretary because of ‘his ignorance of foreign ...”

“... heart of a heartless world’. A History Workshop meeting on ‘Popular Romance from Robin Hood to Mills and Boon’ was right up my street. Raphael was there, sitting on the floor in the packed main hall of Ruskin College where he taught adult students, amid dozens of historians from both inside and outside the university. He looked like the ...”

“... terms with them. The story of that accommodation was the story of his career as a composer, as Robin Holloway grippingly demonstrated in his early book Debussy and Wagner. Holloway’s explication of Jeux, Debussy’s 17-minute ballet, as a molecular refashioning of Wagner’s four-hour opera, is a tour de force of applied musical analysis. Holloway sees ...”

“... the bridge from theory to action. As New Left Review, having recently sawn off its liberal dead wood, declared in July 1968, it was the ‘production and circulation of theory’ in the French universities that had led ‘to the greatest mass upsurge seen in Europe for thirty years’. Theory was the new locomotive of history. But this put us on this side ...”

“... that she was lesbian and couldn’t tell anyone about it, until she eventually met a woman called Robin who worked for John Lewis and they moved in together. She had fallen in love for the first time aged six – with a fair-haired girl called Melvina – but it was only when she arrived in London to find work as a secretary that she was able to ...”