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“... David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so far-fetched, since Hutchinson tells us that Cromwell was responsible for transforming the England ...”

“... the poem ‘says’ will be accompanied by biographical information about the author. Underneath Robert Graves’s ‘Symptoms of Love’, for instance, we learn this: ‘Scientists have recently classified love as a form of psychosis. Robert Graves knew all about this. The poet once threw himself out of a third-floor ...”

“... grinds his teeth in silence, no interviews, no comment. Silence of a different sort descended on Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department when journalists started probing after her death: Marilyn had been a phone call away from killing Bobby’s career, and possibly brother Jack’s as well. The silence of those whom Anthony Summers failed to catch suggests ...”

“... that the biography’s publishers, who already include Constant’s Music Ho! and his mentor Cecil Gray’s Musical Chairs on their list (perhaps they are planning to add Gray’s Survey of Contemporary Music or Bernard Van Dieren’s Down Among the Dead Men), felt that an investment in the Lambert field ought to be consolidated. Nevertheless, the ...”

“... that has been squandered, with nothing to show for it when the oil runs out. In a candid moment, Cecil Parkinson, the Energy Secretary, admitted that most of it has gone on paying the bills of unemployment. The Eighties under Thatcher are the decade, not of the economic miracle, but of the great missed opportunity. For all their talk of resolution and of ...”

“... by no means facile, but it does encourage some curious distortions. We are told, for example, that Robert Bridges’s editing of the proto-Modernist poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins accommodated their dangerous excess to a ‘prevailing orthodoxy’, and ‘muffled’ their ‘critique of industrialisation’. Brooker and Widdowson associate the literary ...”

“... to do with Pindar. Elsewhere, when a certain grossness is needed, the chance is missed. Both Sir Robert Stapylton (1647) and Henry Fielding (1743) have a go at translating Juvenal’s ferocious account of the profligate Empress Messalina working as a prostitute in a Roman brothel and both suppress Juvenal’s reference to gilded nipples (‘papillis ...”

“... great resemblance between his own, open-ended journey and the intrusions of earlier strangers: of Robert Moffat, Livingstone and various envoys of the London Missionary Society, who thrived on scruples; of Cecil Rhodes, and an assortment of English and Boer traders, who did without them; of the Voortrekkers, who left the ...”

“... but not so far from his one-time prep school, St Cyprian’s. There he had met George Orwell and Cecil Beaton, and the three began to develop their characteristic talents: Orwell by reading Gulliver’s Travels and brooding satirically on the horrors to be enshrined later in Such, Such Were the Joys; Beaton by singing ‘If you were the only girl in the ...”

“... artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be wrong, however, to allow pedantic ...”

“... in the present version of Tawaststjerna’s book. Aping Sibelius’s own habits of compression, Robert Layton has run the last two Swedish Finnish volumes into one, truncating or omitting the musicological I chapters that counterpoint the biographical narrative throughout and unbalancing his own English version, which retains them in Volumes I (a ...”

“... Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady appeared in Time and Tide in the 1930s and whose ‘Robert’ is similarly laconic, impassive and discouraging. This fairly benign fiction, created perhaps as much for herself as for her daughters, concealed the painful truth that Desmond drank too much, spent too much and went from one unsuccessful job to ...”

“... thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All.’ In 1938, A.L. Rowse, who knew him at All Souls, went further, pillorying Lothian as ‘Britain’s public enemy ...”

“... of English artists and intellectuals. Her great-uncle was the painter Rudolph Lehmann, friend of Robert Browning and George Eliot. Her father, R.C. Lehmann, was a well-known writer and man of letters. Of her siblings, a younger sister is Beatrix Lehmann, the actress, her younger brother John Lehmann, poet, and fructifying editor and founder of the London ...”

“... in the Brera at Milan. Till now the picture’s identity has remained unknown, but my colleague Robert Dingley, to whose learning this review is much indebted, has identified it as one by the Russian artist Karl Brullov; it shows, in the sentimental fashion of the time, a series of pathetic incidents during the destruction of Pompeii. A year later, Bulwer ...”