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“... Uwe Kitzinger, who published a fascinating ‘instant’ study of the campaign in 1976, but Robert Saunders offers something different: a comprehensive historical account, which relates debates about Europe to the wider social and cultural contexts of Britain in the 1970s. The Sex Discrimination Act became law in 1975, and Saunders devotes considerable ...”

“... rather than paying for them herself. When she gave Kenilworth Castle to her favourite, Robert Dudley, it was both a magnificent gift and a considerable restoration project. He turned it into a palace, and built a new wing in anticipation of the queen’s visit. Her 19-day stay in 1575 became part of the myth of Gloriana, ensuring that as many ...”

“... at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of course, one could object and say ...”

“... suit, and who hints at painful punishments awaiting those who infringe the rules of her exotic craft. This is one apparent strand in the plot. Another is that PB, an operator so unabashedly mercenary that he can describe himself as a Hershey Bar whore, has seemingly contrived to fall in love and to taste some of the torments reserved for venal souls who ...”

“... appeared in Punch and the other papers on the eve of the invasion. The celebrated photographer Robert Capa was there, however, at least in the third wave or so, and before he scrambled back on the landing-craft he ‘felt a shock and was suddenly covered in feathers’. He wondered if somebody had been killing ...”

“... claims made on his behalf, Michael Hofmann’s recent hailing of Brodsky as the true successor to Robert Lowell and great American poet of our age has at least the virtue of unambivalence. We may not agree with it, but the terms are clear. Hitherto, through no fault of his own, the poet has seemed to occupy a position of statelessness somewhere between ...”

“... Naipaul has always had a mage-like quality, weaving a mystique both about himself and about the craft of writing. Theroux by contrast is a hodman, a stylish and competent craftsman; one who lived in Naipaul’s mild and magnificent eye but failed ever to possess himself of the inimitable fire. So, for those of us uninterested in India, Africa, railways ...”

“... the 1950s, edited by D.J. Enright, appeared in 1955, followed a year later by New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume ...”

“... illustrator than in the 1960s as a Pop artist, if by ‘fine’ we mean the apparent signs of craft, handwork and subjective expression. And the reverse is also true: his great silkscreens begun in 1962 show a ‘designer’s intelligence’, and, as Benjamin Buchloh has written, his Pop art carries over traits of his commercial illustration: ‘extreme ...”

“... Statecraft’ is a word not much heard nowadays. The idea that politics could be a craft or techne, familiar to readers of Plato and Machiavelli, is well-nigh beyond superannuation. But even though there’s little bite left in the old dog, it can still bark at a full moon. Its main currency now is in conspiracy theory – or, with the recursive tic which marks this style of political analysis, conspiracy theory theory ...”

“... when RUC men in Belfast are killing people with plastic bullets and the IRA are practising their craft with bullet and bomb. Paulin’s response to these immediacies is erratic. Sometimes his poems take a superior attitude to their themes. In ‘Desertmartin’ he sets his lithe intelligence against the ‘parched certainties’ he ascribes to the Protestant ...”

“... of the First World War, London still beckoned aspiring American poets. Ezra Pound arrived in 1908, Robert Frost in 1912, and T.S. Eliot in 1914. When Pound arrived he was only 23, Eliot was 26, but Frost was almost 39. He had been writing poetry, most of it unpublished, for some twenty years, and the difference in style was striking. Set beside the early work ...”

“... used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the ...”

“... be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its ...”

“... up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages on these (and other) periods: none so rich as the gathering of 1 June 1969 at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara ...”