“... young man’s name is Chevalier, which was the name of the man friendship with whom helped to ruin Robert Oppenheimer’s career. Chevalier was not gay but equally reprehensibly a Communist. 11 May, Long Crichel. Yesterday as I was driving down to Dorset (with no radio) the prime minister had gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to ...”

“... periodically reverts to a hirsute beast in Virginie Despentes’s torrid first-person rewrite of Robert Louis Stevenson (its title winningly translated as ‘Hairs on Me’). The creatures are present because short stories make it their business to speculate about an otherness they do not have time to investigate, and animals are far-reaching analogies. They ...”

“... into a flat with other young littérateurs, including the future avant-garde poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. He also took a job in a record store, where he met his first wife (they split up after six months) and then his second, Kleo, who introduced him to Bay Area hard-left politics and became his first willing muse. Throughout the 1950s, Dick worked on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pulled the piece in the second edition and admonished the journalist. Even Brady is persuaded that Robert Wise’s defensive protestations about the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons amount to a proven charge of obscurity and indecisiveness on Welles’s part. But the memo from Welles to Wise that he quotes from as evidence is perfectly ...”

“... Cambridge. Out of favour and of office in the years from 1604, the period dominated by his enemy Robert Cecil, Greville thought to occupy his leisure with a history of the Tudors, only to be thwarted by Cecil’s refusal to allow him access to the state papers. Cecil’s response is understandable, for historical scholarship – like historical drama, which ...”

“... in view of the use which Strawson makes of his naturalism, may want to return to Hume will find Robert Fogelin’s Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature a useful guide. Fogelin offers a detailed, though not systematically structured, account of the various sceptical arguments in the Treatise. In contrast to many recent interpreters, Fogelin ...”

“... patronage. The jury which acquitted of treason one of the London Corresponding Society leaders, Dr Robert Crossfield, in 1796 was made up of two merchants, two masons, a corn factor, sugar baker, wine merchant, coachmaker, carpenter, bookseller, distiller and tailor. While the members of working trades represented on such panels were not journeymen or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is ...”

“... were German spies. Lord Alfred Douglas used the occasion of the trial to accuse Wilde’s friend Robert Ross of being the ‘leader of all the sodomites in London’.)Siegfried’s face darkened. ‘Do you know we actually sat in dug-outs in France and talked about that trial? The papers were full of it, I think it was the one thing that could have made me ...”