“... is being used to pave the way for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. Meanwhile, in Britain, Robert Bittlestone has recently argued that Odysseus’ homeland is not modern Ithaki, but the peninsula of Paliki, now attached to Kefalonia, but once, he claims, a separate island. Geologists may manage to prove that Paliki was once detached from Kefalonia, but ...”

“... Brotton offers sensitive readings of plays that veer between crude caricatures of Islam (as in Robert Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon, which contains a cameo by a fire-breathing brass head of the ‘God Mahomet’) and more nuanced or informed portrayals, including the uneasy and shifting identities inhabited by Othello – the Christian Moor who, at ...”

“... Barry was an eccentric, seen ‘in his worst (that is to say, his maddest) days’, according to Robert Southey, in a dirt and paint-encrusted green baize coat with a tired old wig. But a bequest was the best hope for the two women, whose other male relatives had proven unreliable. Margaret’s brother, John, apprenticed to a Dublin lawyer, had already ...”

“... dramatic, case-by-case study of a family in crisis. On the other hand, he isn’t immune to what Robert Frost once called ‘the august occasions of the state’, and this makes his drama all the stronger. In Episode 3, when George VI is dead and the aforementioned David turns up at Marlborough House to have tea with Queen Mary, the atmosphere is daintily ...”

“... have missed on previous occasions. Two of her Partisan Review essays – on the cancellation of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954 and on a Beat poets’ reading at Columbia in 1958 – stand out for me in this respect. Like a good liberal – ‘I was against both communism and McCarthyism. They were enemies of each other, but I was the ...”

“... ancient sources contradict one another on the details of his downfall, but it is immortalised in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in which Sejanus (a young Patrick Stewart in the BBC adaption) is presented by his successor, Macro, with the letter ordering his summary execution and the butchery of all his family. After seven years at the apex of power, Macro was ...”

“... political turmoil, though their precise role remains murky. The American hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a friend of Nigel Farage, was accused of aiding the Leave campaign with data analytics expertise, via the now defunct company Cambridge Analytica. Hedge funds were generous backers of both the Leave and Remain campaigns in 2016, but both sides ...”

“... company he wanted to join (the straight-acting insiders of the new moment, like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Frank O’Hara). A successful commercial artist, homosexual, Catholic, working-class – the grounds for exclusion, or self-exclusion, were multiple. Warhol’s parents were Ruthenians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father came to ...”

“... than any number of academic studies of the seaman’s condition. Nagle’s contemporary Robert Hay, the illiterate son of a Scottish weaver, was another who acquired his whole education at sea. Hay survived the wreck of the frigate Amethyst in Plymouth Sound in 1811 with a copy of Isaac Watts’s Improvement of the Mind in his pocket, and in time ...”

“... of resistance: he sided with Douglas Lute and General Cartwright, against Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, in telling Obama in 2009 to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan immediately. Again, in the case of Libya, Biden made the right arguments (though again Obama declined to follow them) in opposing the overthrow of Gaddafi. It will take the same ...”

“... later, he concludes: ‘Who cares?’ In order to imagine the expertise of the legendary angler Robert Pashley (‘the Wizard of the Wye’), who ‘caught more than ten thousand salmon from the Wye at an average weight of 16 pounds’, Fort wades the river to try his luck, only to trip on a rock and fall in the drink. ‘I took this as a sign that the ...”

“... female Thucydides’, though when she attacked his late father, the former prime minister Robert Walpole, he backtracked, deciding she was a ‘foolish’ nihilist, ‘levelling all for no end or purpose’. Her writings on female education influenced Mary Wollstonecraft. Understandably, the profile of such a radical figure dimmed at home during the ...”

“... legal action brought Private Eye considerable media attention, and new readers.) Robert Maxwell had a penchant for pre-emptive writs and high profile defamation actions. Over the past twenty years, however, lawfare has ratcheted up significantly. Caroline Kean, who is representing openDemocracy in the Jusan case, says that the rules of ...”

“... intricate for mass production but also too impractical to be worth the expenditure. The polymath Robert Hooke summarily dismissed the gadgets when he witnessed them at work in 1673: ‘Saw Sir S. Morland’s Arithmetic engine. Very Silly.’ By the mid-19th century, after improvements in gearing and metalwork, mechanical calculators had become more reliable ...”

“... work wouldn’t be the same without the patronage of John of Gaunt, or John Donne’s without Robert Drury. Given the sparseness of the documentation, it is particularly instructive to consider aspects of the creation of texts that are not what we would today think of as authorship. Watt looks at other ways in which women participated in writing, as with ...”