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“... 1839 and 1939. She outlines and evaluates the contribution of Caroline Norton to law reform, Elizabeth Blackwell to the medical profession, Florence Nightingale to nursing, Emily Davies to education, Josephine Butler to the attack on the double standard of morality, Margaret Sanger to birth control, and Emma Goldman to causes that anticipate the feminism ...”

“... A recent interview I had with the chairman of the Russian Central Bank exemplifies the dangerously tense atmosphere within which the politics of the Soviet Union have been conducted since the August putsch – and underscores the importance of what Arkady Vaksberg writes in his uneven, irritating but critically important book. What Georgy Matiukhin wanted to say was that a large part of the developing business culture of the Soviet Union was criminal ...”

“... so in a jaunty tone that turns somersaults over despair. Such energy is sadly absent from David Roberts’s book The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, though, like Charke, Roberts is more concerned with events behind the scenes and in the auditorium than with those on the stage. Determinedly ...”

“... 1950; the birth dates for Beier’s sample (which includes oral histories gathered in the 1970s by Elizabeth Roberts, one of the method’s great pioneers, for whom Beier worked), by contrast, range from 1872 to 1958. Beier, in other words, is examining the practices not only of Fisher’s informants’ generation, but also those of their parents and ...”

“... and Myres, and Stenton) and Taylor’s. I doubt if the new one will fare any better. John Roberts, the general editor, does not show his hand in detail, and we must keep our fingers crossed about the whole being greater than the parts by giving ‘an account of the development of our country in time’ – ‘our country’ meaning something different ...”

“... On​ 14 April 1988, right at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, a US navy frigate, Samuel B. Roberts, hit a mine and was badly damaged. Ten of the crew were injured. The US blamed Iran – even though Iraq had been just as active in laying mines – and attacked the Iranian navy, sinking the frigate Sahand and the fast attack craft Joshan ...”

“... Etonians into publishing the story that they threw puddings at each other annually in honour of Elizabeth I. He claimed to have bonded with Cecil Rhodes after urging him to buy an ingeniously long-handled brush for washing one’s back. His boyish enthusiasm for new technologies never left him. At fifteen, he was the daredevil rider of a high-wheel 52-inch ...”

“... the first volume of the New Oxford History of England series, under the general editorship of J.M. Roberts, is something of an awesome event. Generations of schoolchildren and students thumbed their way through their predecessors, Davies and Clark, Woodward and Ensor, and it must be an agreeable thought to the new authors that their books will be selling deep ...”

“... threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up for a second book ...”

“... who has the best claim to have founded our modern idea of the royal family. The reader of Andrew Roberts’s new biography rejoices too. In many ways, the king’s madness is the most interesting thing about a monarch who never included among his delusions the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan ...”

“... Cobbett called her ‘the Old Bishop in petticoats’), was already a celebrity. William Roberts, the family friend entrusted with the task of producing the book, made her into a saint. He presented her as a vessel chosen by God, who had carried her ‘through great temptations and trials’ to her ‘exemplary eminence’. Among Hannah More’s ...”

“... Known only to his lovers and a few in his inner circle, the Game has now been made public in Neil Roberts’s remarkable biography of the poet, published almost a decade after Redgrove’s death, along with a new Collected Poems. The revelations in Roberts’s book have an undeniably voyeuristic fascination but they also ...”

“... people who wouldn’t talk about his hero: these include Claire Bloom, Alexander Cohen, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Sir John Gielgud, Hugh Griffiths, Joseph Losey, James Mason, Vincente Minnelli, Mike Nichols, Rachel Roberts, Daphne Rye, Jean Simmons, and three of his wives, Sybil Christopher, ...”

“... reminds me of the comfortable romances of the Thirties that consoled us for the Depression. Cecil Roberts, author of Pilgrim Cottage, wrote lots of them. They rescued their hero from the work-bench or the dole queue by means of a ticket to upper-class privilege in Venice or love in the Tyrol, but they brought him safely back to home cooking and a childhood ...”

“... anniversary celebrations (as well as Walcott and Livingstone, the list includes Ben Okri, Michèle Roberts, Elizabeth Cook, Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth and Irvine Welsh), the administrators told me ‘family fun’ was to be the mood. So instead, would I give a talk about The Wobbly Tooth, a little children’s book I wrote ...”