“... an experimental literary culture to sustain it – particularly in the 1970s and 1980s (a period Robert Sheppard has called the ‘utopia of dissent’), when Basil Bunting was president of the Poetry Society and Eric Mottram was editing Poetry Review. Certain key figures emerge as influences or promoters, but the tradition ... is long, dissenting and ...”

“... the basis for Ken Russell’s 1971 film of the same name. There is also a more recent account, Robert Rapley’s A Case of Witchcraft (1998). Michel de Certeau’s Possession at Loudun, first published in French in 1970, has been published in English now because Certeau (who died in 1986) is a very fashionable cultural theorist. Six of his many books have ...”

“... symmetry, to 1984. The brother is romantically attached to the insurrectionary tradition of Robert Emmet, a tie which has left him and his sister on the margins of the new society. The balancing of hope and frailty at the mid-point of the century is masterly: ‘The past receded a little with the day; time yet unspent was left to happen as fearfully as ...”

“... policy was said to be influenced by West’s views, as channelled through his bedtime reading of Robert Kaplan’s more recent travelogue, Balkan Ghosts. A counter-narrative soon surfaced from the advocates of intervention. They argued that Bosnia, and especially Sarajevo, was not the problem but the solution: a multi-confessional, multicultural haven of ...”

“... are fiction under another name, heirs to such earlier romance memoirs and traveller’s tales as Robert Paltock’s The Adventures of Peter Wilkins, the memoirs of the Comtesse d’Aulnoy and the better-known Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy. But Saunders’s readings lucidly reveal the origins of the continuing, ever growing eagerness of audiences to feel ...”

“... pools of unexpected calm. But he wasn’t simply a New York photographer-novelist. Convinced that Robert Frank had missed out on the real story of America in the 1950s – the story of the suburbs – he made his way across the country, and his travels put him in an entirely different relation to photographic and physical space. He left New York for ...”

“... aided by Kennedy holdovers – among them, the enormously influential secretary of defence, Robert McNamara. By 1968, with more than half a million American troops stationed in the former French colony of Indochina, his massive military expenditure began to starve his Great Society. And second, although he presided over imperial America’s South-East ...”

“... wanted to be an artist, too, but when Peggy Guggenheim exhibited Gypsy’s work at her gallery, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko were offended by the company and sought other representation. But of course stripping also sold books: ‘The constant references to stripping in relationship to her writing or artwork frustrated her, but she refused to recognise ...”

“... as well as the subject – an approach she shares with the new breed of nature writers, such as Robert Macfarlane and Helen MacDonald, whose propensity for walking allows plenty of space for associative thinking and oblique connections. It also reflects habits of thought of which hyperlinking and googling are part. Sometimes, as in the work of Iain Sinclair ...”

“... supposedly irked that Kennedy had failed to provide air cover at the Bay of Pigs or angry that Robert Kennedy was targeting them, figured prominently. Now that Castro’s epic reign is coming to an end, without any help from the US, perhaps the Americans, and the mobsters, will make a return to the ...”

“... Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably ...”

“... Jeanne-Claude, Rachel Whiteread, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Koons (who in fact used basketballs), Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, once again he doesn’t trouble us with names, as if that would be to indulge such artists further. These swipes are an odd fit in a book that means to illuminate the current interplay between architecture and the other ...”

“... exchanges,’ Hughes says in one of his more oracular moments, ‘we may perhaps look forward to Robert Kayll’s attack on the East India trade.’* Human sacrifice and counting (and accounting) are, then, interacting subjects of this book. Even in Greek tragedy counting denotes a culture of order that the use of human sacrifice may destroy. In Euripides ...”

“... sense. There isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus in Victorian literature ...”

“... sits near my desk as a permanent challenge, like the Pandora’s box opened at the end of the Robert Aldrich film Kiss Me Deadly. A casket that contains the sound of apocalypse, blinding enlightenment, hurt. Dilworth’s boxes fold death in a tender embrace: we have only his word for the rituals that have been observed. And he’s not telling. There is a ...”