Thank you Jorge & Michael.

I was being stupid - its the only explanation!

The line I had been executing was 

mtcars[rownames=="Valiant"] # missing rownames argument

but the line I quoted in my post was 

mtcars[rownames(mtcars) != "Valiant",]  # How could I write the correct line in the mailing list and not where it matters i.e in R?

Thank you.

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