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“... the inferior evidence’ – in its acceptance, for example, of the early martyrdom of the Apostle John. At other times, its judgment is strikingly uncritical for a trained scientist. Thus, he regards the Didache as primitive (as I believe on other grounds it is) because it ‘appeals especially to the modern Christian humanist’ in that it contains no ...”

“... that she radically undermines traditional masculine values. In another centenary study, however, John Robinson insists that she is a timeless lyric poet whose work is not ‘centrally representative of women’. Robinson’s refusal to consider Dickinson’s polemical and subversive imagination is disappointing, but ...”

“... and thereafter in Italy. Carpenter, predictably, finds the three essayists – Richard Humphreys, John Alexander and Peter Robinson – ‘taking a rather solemn approach to the whole thing’; whereas, he assures us, Pound’s exertions on behalf of these arts partook ‘more than a little of the amiable joke’. Before it ...”

“... John Charles Robinson​ , perhaps the greatest connoisseur Britain has ever known, was turned down on four occasions for the post of director of the National Gallery. He was thought to be too closely associated with the trade (‘little better than a dealer’), and was known to have operated with scant respect for officialdom when employed by the South Kensington museum ...”

“... him in the 1750s. So too, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only ...”

“... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...”

“... do better to read the summary expertly given in The Rosetta Stone, or, best of all, in Andrew Robinson’s lucid and well illustrated chapter on hieroglyphics in Lost Languages (whose many line drawings are at once valuable and deceptive, since they make the signs displayed look a great deal easier to identify than they are in the worn and weathered ...”

“... In 1980, when she was in her late thirties, Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping. Her way of seeing things seemed to have sprung from nowhere and was like no one else’s. The novel won awards, high praise from critics, and the devotion of readers, and it has not been forgotten: its fame has spread in a slow aftershock, passed on by word of mouth, cropping up on lists of the best contemporary novels ...”

“... plotted. It has a love-plot, with a sadistic outcome. Bardamu has a double in the book, called Robinson, who turns up regularly but more or less at random, in Flanders, in Africa, in America and then back in France, and who is Bardamu’s callous tutor in human iniquity: he has no saving graces at all. Yet a girl, Madelon (the name is suggestive: ‘La ...”

“... it is made here; and still more interesting is the hypothesis that Branwell’s trouble with the Robinson family, where he went as tutor to the son, and where Anne was already governess, was not quite what he claimed. Did Branwell invent his fatal passion for Mrs Lydia Robinson, a solid matron nearly twenty years older ...”

“... so powerful an influence on who you are. The ‘dispossessed/ and half-tamed Englishman’ of ‘John Maydew or The Allotment’ returns from war to find that he must choose between ‘an England, profitlessly green’ and a landscape where           slag in lavafolds rolls beneath him. The first part of the poem seems to be spoken to the man in ...”

“... for an unwieldy and dangerous entity created from ill-assorted bits and pieces. As Charles Robinson notes in his new edition of the novel, such confusion set in soon after the book’s first publication in 1818. In October 1823, at a masked ball in Liverpool, a local newspaper reported: ‘Mr Harris, of Preston, personated (we are ...”

“... evil have been the days of my life,’ Jacob declares as his wanderings come to an end.Marilynne Robinson is interested in readers of Scripture (she always capitalises the word). It furnishes the mental world of her characters and structures their stories. Her Gilead novels are a refraction of Genesis’s interest in wayward sons, familial deceit, guilt and ...”

“... by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know it, or if we do not know it, we ought to know it.’ Once, governments had ...”