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“... serving a six-month prison sentence, and virtually without medical support. Again, a Florida man, Robert Randall, who had contracted Aids following a blood transfusion, had, with great difficulty, obtained legal authorisation to use cannabis to reduce the nausea he suffered. He, too, was arrested at gunpoint, tried and convicted on a charge of growing ...”

“... the law officers perhaps doubted whether the more serious charge would hold up. The trials of Robert Watt and David Downie, which revealed parallel plots for insurrection in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, set a more direct precedent. They were the first trials for high treason to take place in Scotland since the 1351 statute had become law there. The ...”

“... Roberta Goren’s book should be compulsory reading in every course of peace studies. It explains in great detail how the USSR after Stalin’s death adapted to the nuclear age its strategy for achieving hegemony in a world dominated by the mass media and by weapons of mass destruction. It was a dual strategy, with an upper and a lower face. The brightly-lit upper face comprised the campaign for peace and disarmament, promoted by Communist ‘front’ organisations; the darkened, lower face involved the use of very different means to achieve the same end without provoking nuclear war ...”

“... this persuasion she did nothing to controvert – so that when her ardent admirer and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not ...”

“... answer for half a century: Plato made Atlantis up. That was his response to a lecture by Fernand Robert in 1956, when the speaker tentatively referred to the theory that Atlantis was inspired by the lost Minoan civilisation, and he had not changed his mind by the time of his death in 2006, shortly after correcting the manuscript of The Atlantis Story, a ...”

“... The coalface of Soviet politics is collapsing; among the long-term miners, the professional Sovietologists, this has had a salutary effect. Two separate work-gangs had emerged over previous decades. One drove its picks into history; the other into politics, economics or sociology. This division of labour was caused both by pressure on researchers to choose a single discipline in the humanities and social sciences, and by the global increase in researchers – although the British Government in the Eighties shamefully diminished the national commitment to Soviet studies ...”

“... just been a nuisance to him. However, in 1932, he got to know the young, beautiful and dotty Robert Heber Percy, otherwise known as ‘the Mad Boy’, for whom he fell and who became a fixture in his household, eventually inheriting Berners’s estate. ‘No one,’ Mark Amory writes, ‘could liberate Berners himself at this stage, but Heber Percy ...”

“... It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976 ...”

“... When he first heard of William Morris’s death, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary, ‘He is the most wonderful man I have known,’ then added more equivocally: ‘unique in this, that he had no thought for anything or person, including himself, but only for the work he had in hand.’ This handsome new edition of Morris’s letters does not entirely answer our natural question of how a man so often apparently unmoved by other persons should have had the explosive creative energy to become famous as poet, artist, decorator, printer, manufacturer and socialist ...”

“... For three centuries Rochester has been in and out of the pantheon of English poetry, but today we can see more clearly that the romantic image of the lyrical libertine who underwent a spectacular deathbed conversion has obscured a major poetic talent. Not that the old picture was wrong, but it was partial. The trouble has been that it is hard to fit his philosophical and religious beliefs, poetic practice and dissolute life into a whole ...”

“... effluent. Lord Normanbrook, a predecessor in the Highest Office of State now held by Sir Robert Strongarm, long ago decided this point: ‘any information arising in a government department is officially secret until it is officially released’ (Filchbag Peeper, The Law of Official Leaking, 1978, p. 209). Information was only in the ‘public ...”

“... of the ordeal determined by the weather and the tightness of the bindings. In Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves remembers seeing his faithful servant, Private Fahy, spreadeagled on a wheel. ‘Tottie’, as he was known, got ‘28 days of it’ for drunkenness. Downey had been clobbered with the full ‘84 days’ on 25 November, a few weeks before he was ...”

“... Most of these are now in libraries in Texas. As early as 1934, Beasley’s original publisher, Robert McAlmon, was complaining that a rare book dealer was asking $40 for a copy of the book, which had been priced at $2.50. (Copies of the Texas Book Club edition occasionally surface, selling at $125 or higher.) The memoir recounts Beasley’s difficult ...”

“... aposiopesis may be allowed as a structural feature, as when Yeats ends his ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ by claiming that he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends because ‘a thought/Of that late death took all my heart for speech.’ We may grant Yeats command of that trick and also say that to confront horror with irony calls for ...”

“... two new English translations, one by Robin Kirkpatrick, the other by the husband and wife team of Robert and Jean Hollander, should be welcomed. Each edition is the final volume of a long labour, and each helps the reader see this last cantica in the context of the previous two. With Virgil as his guide, Dante has already spiralled down through hell, seen ...”