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“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”

“... her brother, with his poor singing voice, ‘murdering’ Grétry – the word is the Irish tenor Michael Kelly’s – and we witness a number of total theatrical flops, which have always provided good copy for the annalist. Of course, it is all very much in the anecdotal line. Is it any the worse for that? Ms Kelly is not writing for a specialist ...”

“... the philology of the Old English language was rigorous. It was, and still is, though Mitchell and Robinson in the Oxford Mods Guide, and now Gneuss in the Cambridge Companion, have shown that it can be made more attractive. Well-known, too, is the philological background of two writers from Oxford, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (the title of whose Oxford ...”

“... allies of New Labour. Brown’s chief man in the Treasury is his friend and generous host Geoffrey Robinson, whose enormous wealth is stashed away in a tax haven. One millionaire in the Government is not enough. As soon as New Labour was elected, its ministers scurried into the City to seek out millionaires to conduct the Government’s business: David Simon ...”

“... his life circumventing, with intriguing results. In the Heart of the Country, Life and Times of Michael K, Foe and Waiting for the Barbarians all bear testimony to his mastery of allegory and narrative voice to evoke a quality of other-worldliness. In a lean, almost mathematical prose, everything is sacrificed to clarity of thought and expression, born of ...”

“... from a Virginia plantation at about the age of ten and became the slave of the naval officer Michael Pascal – but his memories of growing up in a West African village are more suspect, as Taylor notes. It’s more likely he was born in America and knew Africa only at second hand. Both Equiano and Spavens fought in major actions in 1759, Britain’s ...”

“... his at the Mexican Cineteca and then drive over to his house. I would say, ‘I saw El today, or Robinson Crusoe,’ or whatever I had seen, and he would say: ‘Terrible film, the director should be shot.’ I would murmur in polite disagreement, and ask him a question about the work. One day I said I had very much liked a French film he had made in ...”

“... scholarly assessment’. It was about a year and a half before the speculation was scotched. Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr Wordsworth’ was in fact the poet’s cousin Robinson Wordsworth, collector of customs at Harwich, who was being paid for expenses incurred in arresting and taking to London ...”

“... grey moss brushes my solitary boat as I pass. I go far up the Sebastian River as utterly alone as Robinson Crusoe. I meet alligators, porpoises, pelicans, cranes, and even deer, but not a human soul. Looking back more than a decade later, Woolson recalled ‘the absolute tranquillity and sleepiness’ St Augustine offered, particularly by contrast to the ...”

“... Stravinsky debonair in double-breasted suit photographed in Los Angeles by his friend Edward G. Robinson; a merry Stravinsky at a recording session (of The Rake’s Progress), one hand holding a cigarette, the other in conjunction with a whisky bottle. The implacability of the man stays stamped on his photographed features till the end – strongly marked ...”

“... that when he was a child in the 1820s Lady Hester Stanhope’s name was as well known to him as Robinson Crusoe’s, though he thought Crusoe was more believable. A century later, her table-talk (retailed in six volumes by her doctor-companion, Charles Meryon, and first published in 1845-46) was still being studied for the School Certificate. Admired as the ...”

“... The estate was sold ... great changes have been wrought/In all the neighbourhood’: the end of ‘Michael’, we are told, expresses an English experience ‘in danger of being not merely exploited but exterminated’. Massacres again! And it didn’t happen. The English genius – or so we used to be told – is for compromise: and over issues like dialects ...”

“... Abbey, where, ‘if you look very closely’, you will see the name of Governor George Augustus Robinson, officially ‘Chief Protector of the Aborigines’ in Tasmania, described as their ‘Pacificator’. If you have to look ‘very closely’ it can’t be all that prominent in modern British life. But for Lawson, the Tasmanian issue still lies at the ...”

“... lampshade?’ Here and in his more gnomic utterances (‘We are watching some dreary music by Michael Tippett and Daddy keeps saying: “When does the shooting start?”’) Fitzgerald also surely owed something to E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady appeared in Time and Tide in the 1930s and whose ‘Robert’ is similarly laconic, impassive ...”

“... is the latest in a long line of works about Sappho by women writers. An early example is Mary Robinson’s breathless sonnet sequence, Sappho and Phaon (1796). Robinson aspires to the Longinian Sublime; sadly, her writing sounds like this: In vain you fly me! on the madd’ning main SAPPHO shall haunt thee ‘mid the ...”