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“... has been no total war between major powers since 1945. The most prominent exponent of this view, Robert Jervis of Columbia University’s Institute of War and Peace Studies, argued that such wars can no longer occur if statesmen are rational. In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press suggest that these grand claims are ...”

“... together for a movie. But the structure of hero and rival in neo-aristocratic competition for the conquest of the elemental returns in Salter’s later, more complex novels. Solo Faces was originally written as a screenplay, after Salter had seen a script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring ...”

“... by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet. Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any sense, especially when it came to pornography and drugs. The ...”

“... belligerati, who ignore the more informed analyses of Manningham-Buller or the former CIA officer Robert Baer. If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily ...”

“... Literary imagination here reconfigures the territory by reviving memories of this site or that. Robert Macfarlane has pointed out that the verb ‘to write’ refers, via the old English Writan, to a kind of incisive track-making. Thus one would originally ‘write’ by drawing a point across a surface of wood, stone or earth: by furrowing a track. In ...”

“... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...”

“... homosexual rape carried out by an older man – specifically, a domineering uncle-guardian named Robert Manning, whose bed and board were shared by the fledgling author before he left for Bowdoin College. (Manning also happened to be, for those who might want to make something of it, the most renowned pomologist in the United States.) For ...”

“... said that sexual jealousy was the next great obstacle before mankind, demanding a heroic culture-conquest. (It is a bit pathetic that they thought nothing worse would crop up.) Joyce insisted at one point, when the book was newly out, that it had no moral ‘and not one serious line in it’, but this was a claim to be an artist, usual among Ibsenites: he ...”

“... Treatise of Government is ‘slavery’, a fate to which Locke thought the political theory of Sir Robert Filmer condemned everyone except monarchs. Still, Machiavelli’s influence on the American revolutionaries is plain. His description in the Discourses, memorable in the way of oxymorons, of the way the tribunate made the Roman republic ‘more ...”

“... Le Roy Ladurie, whose Times of Feast, Times of Famine was published in 1971. A decade later, Robert Rotberg and Theodore Rabb published a trailblazing volume of essays, Climate and History, their mission to explore ‘an exciting frontier for reading and research’. Recently, the geologist Gifford Miller and his team at the University of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Before making up his mind, Obama commissioned a report on the history of US covert operations. Robert Malley, then Obama’s Middle East adviser and now President Biden’s negotiator with Iran, read the CIA’s classified report. It was, he told me in 2019, a litany of failure. ‘I think there were one or two, out of I don’t know how many tens of ...”

“... feels at causing the pains of childbirth and the responsibility England shrugs off for the Tudor conquest, 1798 and the legacy of Loyalist extremism. Riven by inconsistencies, the poem struggles to yoke the personal to the political by stacking up double entendres about invaders who ‘came’ among the ‘mounds and ring-forts’ of Ireland/Mrs Heaney and ...”

“... us to the world also conceal our relationship to it. Some would say that’s just as well. ‘The conquest of the earth,’ Conrad wrote, ‘is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’ Today Congo – which was described as a ‘geological scandal’ after copper was discovered in Katanga in 1892 – accounts for less than 1 per cent of the ...”

“... and the Hejaz might well be returned to the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan, its rulers before the conquest by Ibn Saud in 1924; or, to put it differently, the British imperial programme of 1919 would be resurrected (though, if the Hashemites have any sense, they would reject what would without question be a long-term death sentence). Beyond lies China. When ...”