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“... deal of time studying the life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear evidence of this ...”

“... of The Guns of Navarone (1961), adapted from a novel by Alistair MacLean and directed by J. Lee Thompson. By the beginning of the 1960s, the war’s most photogenic episodes had all been used up: The Colditz Story, The Dam Busters, Sink the Bismarck! It was time to let the old action adventure format loose on some vaguely plausible military scenarios. In ...”

“... Philosophes was being pushed off the booksellers’ shelves by such robustly patriotic novels as Robert-Martin Lesuire’s Les Sauvages de l’Europe (1760), in which a young French couple travel to England, the land of advanced philosophy, only to hurry back home after near-fatal experiences with English riots, prisons, highway robberies and insane ...”

“... conflict with the Soviet Union, the theatre in which we feared the war would erupt. As E.P. Thompson wrote, ‘it has never been true that nuclear war is “unthinkable”. It has been thought and the thought has been put into effect.’ The Western model of capitalism may have won – or survived – the Cold War, but so did the bomb. In fact, the bomb ...”

“... hats.’ In addition to resembling – a bit too perfectly – Dupont and Dupond, aka Thomson and Thompson, long-running comic foils to Tintin, the twins had a background that Hergé never spoke of. They’d been born out of wedlock, father unknown, and treated kindly, six years later, by a countess who hired their mother as a chambermaid at a grand estate ...”

“... clear.’ There is much more than nothing here. And the legal-investigative team put together by Robert Mueller, the former FBI director and now special counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference, includes lawyers with formidable competence in the scrutiny of money laundering and ‘financial forensics’ generally. A certain doubt ...”

“... was just and necessary. The group that carried out the Magoo’s Bar bombing in Durban was led by Robert McBride, a senior commander in uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress. After the end of the apartheid regime, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated that attacks like this one were ‘gross ...”

“... separated the theatres, one behind the other, on a vast paved piazza. But something there is, as Robert Frost says, that does not like a wall. From any angle, these schemes suggested disguised factories for making some plebeian product – meat pies, perhaps – inexplicably thrusting out of the harbour, the same problem that had inspired the soon to be ...”

“... had been coerced by Jacob Bronowski (a Cambridge scientist/poet of an earlier generation) and E.P. Thompson (in Witness against the Beast). Ackroyd’s life of Blake had to ease him away from all that, portraying a wilfully obtuse man, with his spites and his angels. He is ticked off for ‘raging in a darkened room’ and not networking his career to greater ...”

“... version of English continuity. As Cairns Craig has argued in Cencrastus, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson see class struggle as fundamental to English history, but conceive that history to be ‘shaped as an autonomous inner trajectory defined by the conflicts and the accommodations between classes which do not need to be understood except in their relations ...”

“... software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word ...”

“... often in soak on the draining board, fads as I thought even as a boy of ten, picked up from Miss Thompson, a herbalistic lady living in the Hallidays who used to give Dad burdock and suchlike ‘for his blood’. 21 February. On the 100th anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn’t have inhabited his ...”

“... of the saving remnant on which the future of reading would depend. The photo on the cover of Denys Thompson’s The Leavises shows him in a jacket impermeable to the insults of time and with the open shirt of a Labour leader. He looks indeed, as his wife wrote of both of them, ‘grey-haired and worn down with battling for survival in a hostile ...”

“... makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the ...”

“... Welles sent detailed instructions for additional cuts, but they were ignored. An assistant editor, Robert Wise, was brought in to chop 30 more minutes out of the running time: half of the second half of the film. It was released on a double bill with Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost, and Welles was never again welcomed by the people in Hollywood with the money to ...”