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“... reasons for seeing off Siborne’s tin and lead Prussians – but not many. Blücher was hardly a knight in shining armour. He had wanted to follow up victory at Waterloo by sacking France as revenge for Austerlitz and Jena. And Wellington and his friends at court and in the cabinet remained wary of Prussian ambition long after 1815, preferring to cement ...”

“... in Brideshead: he approaches his maker with thoughts of the chapel, ‘the tombs, cross-legged knight and doubleted earl’, and of the good old days, ‘the days of wool shearing and the wide corn lands, the days of growth and building, when the marshes were drained and the waste land brought under the plough’. This is splendid schmaltz, like the Albert ...”

“... was even dressed up in drag by the princess and her girls for fun’. In Portrait of a Castrato, Roger Freitas writes that ‘contemporaries frequently regarded castrati as analogues to boys … The castrato does seem frequently to have taken the boy’s role in sodomitical sex.’ Thus castrati could shift and transform themselves. Everybody, it ...”

“... group, Graham’s poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Karl Weschke and Sven Berlin were forged by his understanding of their work: it was his dedication to art, rather than his own art, that impressed them. Hilton said he found Graham’s poems ‘too obscure’, provoking a ...”

“... the glorious city of Cefalú, with its great Norman cathedral built in the 12th century by King Roger II, on the other the beetling cliffs and promontories of the cape. The Aeolian islands, once inhabited by the king of the winds who made the travels of Odysseus so troublesome, are imposing, beguiling forms on the near horizon. The town has always been an ...”

“... in or outside the courts. While ‘comming out of the church’ in Hunstanworth (Co. Durham), Roger Doon denied Anthony Ratcliff’s accusation that he was a thief. ‘Although ye be a gent., and I a poore man, my honestye shalbe as good as yours.’ Ratcliff was horrified: ‘What saith thou? Liknes thou thy honestye to myn?’ He ‘lyftyd up his hand ...”

“... communication through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the traffic.Roger Luckhurst’s ambitious and consistently informative cultural history of the corridor makes brief mention of The Maltese Falcon in accounting for film noir’s preoccupation with bleakly anonymous lobbies, passages and hallways. But it’s not the skills ...”

“... they are studying polished texts of the alliterative revival, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or of Richard II’s court, pre-eminently by Chaucer. But, though acknowledging that modern readers are trained to admire Chaucer best among writers of her period, Coleman spends little time on him, and grounds her discussion instead on a more workaday ...”

“... But the neighbouring streets still provide the decor of deprivation for photographers such as Roger Mayne: scorched curtains, three-legged prams, free-range, snot-rich urchins and, as the architect Peter Barber recalled with nostalgie de la boue, ‘an elderly woman who used to stand at her gate all day long and everybody knew what was going on on the ...”

“... Russian writing failed to move with the times. I have seen Bulgakov described by his translator Roger Cockrell as a ‘Russian writer trapped in Soviet space’. Paustovsky seems not even to have been trapped. He is squarely of the 19th century, a Turgenevian or Chekhovian throwback.Chekhov, almost invariably, and not wrongly, is the point de repère for ...”

“... been playing, with, responsible for their suppression, the commissioner of police for Bruges, one Roger de Bris. This gives quiet pleasure as it’s also the name of the transvestite stage director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, who makes his appearance bare-shouldered and in a heavy ball gown. 7 March. Our pillar box is now emptied at 9 a.m. not by the ...”

“... Aitken and Simon Cowell. On a number of occasions, she connects Joyce’s case with that of Roger Casement, another Irishman hanged for treason in Britain during a world war. The comparison is, to put it mildly, flattering to Joyce, who had a notable effect as a propagandist, but did nothing to earn anybody’s lasting respect. His childhood years in ...”

“... that their advice was rejected for sinister reasons. It is interesting that the contention that Roger Hollis was in the Soviet pay had its parallel in America. One famous American counter-intelligence officer became convinced as he worked and reworked the evidence from defectors that the head of the CIA was a Soviet spy. After such sleuthing it is a relief ...”

“... up frequently in Chaucer among all types and classes, most notably perhaps the Thebans of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Arcite and Palamon. The pair are first found close to death on the battlefield, side by side, wearing the same arms. Taken prisoner, they become rivals for the love of Princess Emily. Their sworn brotherhood was a Chaucerian addition to ...”