“... Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards Vietnam, and he wanted Ellsberg to take charge of the day-to-day details. Ellsberg, then 33 years old, was appointed at the exalted civil service grade of GS-18, equivalent in ...”

“... Lester Winter, a ‘polished, worldly, well-groomed’ young man who introduced him to the work of Robert Frost and Edna St Vincent Millay. Winter planned to become a dentist but had artistic aspirations too, and liked disparaging his family as avaricious philistines (his father was a successful dry-goods merchant). He valued Roth’s immigrant ...”

“... of many waters’. In his remarkable new translation of the Pentateuch, a monument of scholarship, Robert Alter eschews ‘face’ to describe the surface of the world at the start of Genesis, and I miss the cosmic implications, but his first two verses amply compensate with their own originality: ‘When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth ...”

“... art clearly has ‘work’ to do outside the museum. Hickey argues that the public exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio in the early 1990s caused such outrage not because of its content but because Mapplethorpe’s photographs were beautiful, and through their beauty they celebrated their content: ‘It was not that men were making it ... but ...”

“... hold their brothers cheap.’ An accomplished sonneteer, Cullen was a devotee of Keats, but as Robert Hillyer, who taught him during his brief stay at Harvard, made clear, Cullen experimented with a range of forms and published the results in Copper Sun. In his book In Pursuit of Poetry Hillyer wrote: ‘There they all are, ballad stanzas, heroic ...”

“... Florence Carrez, played the title role in Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, the classic film made by Robert Bresson in 1962; Delay became a writer not long after her role in Bresson’s film, and is now an académicienne. She drew attention to Péguy’s dream of fusing faith, hope and charity with the three Republican virtues in order to establish a universal ...”

“... to government health policy has come surreptitiously from Gordon Brown, via Ed Balls, via Robert Peston, in his book Brown’s Britain. Here it is revealed that Brown has serious misgivings about extending competition and private enterprise unthinkingly through the public services, both because of what it might do to what’s left of a public service ...”

“... vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some compelling evidence of contacts between Trump’s people and various Russians. It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a ...”

“... are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters – particularly the one on James Baldwin’s prophetic ...”

“... would often delay the shooting of a scene because he wanted to discuss every element in detail (Robert Redford, who played the Sundance Kid, just wanted to hurry up and finish). ‘Then what Paul would do with the scene would have no relationship to what we’d been talking about for the last half-hour.’ He put far more agony and effort into his ...”

“... conservative Midwestern town, but there is no follow-up on this broad hint. The youngest brother, Robert, stayed in Ohio. James described him as a ‘Babbitt’ – a smug materialist. He too was a published author, though his book was called The Successful High School Athletic Programme. Purdy remarked that if Robert or ...”

“... ally? Paradoxically, this very inversion has led to unpredictable opposition. It was Congressman Robert Dornan of California, the classic Orange Country patriot and flag-waver, who said this week that ‘American boys don’t die for emirs.’ Those who harbour more general reservations are thrown back on irony. Not only did King Hussein seem like ‘one of ...”

“... that his readers read; who steps out of one story and into the next with side-glances at poems by Robert Frost, or who decorates a laconic recital (called ‘Moving the tables’) with parodic swatches of Hemingwayese. The verbal sportiveness can become obtrusive, but one accepts it as a token or offshoot of the creative energies of a very gifted ...”

“... and behaviour in these matters greatly offended the susceptibilities of the chivalrous young Robert Bridges, who from then on avoided him. And yet there is a curious resemblance between the pattern of Butler’s behaviour and that of the exponents of courtly love in the Middle Ages: the same rigid separation between sex, on the one hand, and ...”

“... Marchioness of Londonderry, refer not to her, but to Frances Anne, while Walter Long appears as Robert. The Chartwell Papers are continually cited for quotations which appear in full in the Randolph Churchill/Martin Gilbert companion volumes, or even in the main volumes themselves. This unhelpful practice has been made positively misleading, since, for a ...”