“... MI6 officer seconded to MI5 who introduced himself as Colin Ferguson and later said his name was Robert McLarnon. Believing in neither name, Duddy called him Fred. The Northern Irish members of the link were relatively optimistic that a peace deal might be possible. The conflict had reached a stalemate: the British could contain the IRA but not defeat it and ...”

“... in return. But so-called ‘reciprocal altruism’ isn’t authentically unselfish (as admitted by Robert Trivers, who coined the phrase) if the anticipated benefit is greater than the immediate cost. It’s therefore just as well for us all that altruism takes other forms too. People often bear costs not only in reproductive fitness but in material ...”

“... media than in the hierarchy between them. Gauguin called the ear ‘inferior to the eye’, and Robert Delaunay confessed, in a letter to Franz Marc, that he was ‘horrified by music and noise’ and mistrusted ‘auditory perception’. August Endell, an architect associated with the Jugendstil movement, believed that no visual art had yet succeeded in ...”

“... with Greece and Rome: think of movies like Gladiator and 300, as well as the success of Robert Harris’s Pompeii and his Cicero trilogy. It’s true that antiquity has recently been very good box-office, but preposterous to suggest that this is something new. Any history of film or fiction shows that there has been a passion for the ancient world ...”

“... two extra hours of Downton-free life. This latest crop of period narratives probably began with Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park (2001): at best, a mildly amusing self-conscious pastiche, though it wasn’t clear why a film-maker who could produce Nashville and Short Cuts would bother. The writer credited with Gosford Park was the now ennobled Julian ...”

“... commentators felt there were simply too many books: ‘a vast Chaos and confusion’, according to Robert Burton. ‘The longest life of a man,’ John Cotgrave lamented, ‘is not sufficient to explore so much as the substance of them, which (in many) is but slender.’ Thus careful reading was figured as a kind of profitable destruction: an act of ...”

“... a plump silvered bladder in a house of cardboard. It’s possible to combine both approaches. Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe (1994), for example, takes its subject seriously (she was a homespun mystic, to put it politely, who in the 1430s wrote the first autobiography in English), making recurrent efforts to re-create her world: ‘She sat with ...”

“... self-dismemberment?) What she wants now is to become a hybrid of Flip and the land artist Robert Smithson, who made his mark on Utah’s topography with his immense coiling earthwork, Spiral Jetty. As Reno explains to her New York boyfriend, Sandro Valera (an older, successful minimalist artist and heir to the Valera motorcycle and tyre fortune), the ...”

“... case of the officer class, sheltered believers in empire, deference and loyalty. Second Lieutenant Robert Darley, gazetted in the Royal Regiment of Artillery on 10 February 1915, followed in his father’s footsteps. Born in 1859, George saw action in the Boer War. As a teenager I’d occasionally hazarded what the daily familiarity with death and fearful ...”

“... in Beirut was blown up by explosives packed into a pick-up truck, killing 63 people, including Robert Ames, the CIA’s chief intelligence officer for the Middle East, whose severed hand still wearing his wedding ring was found floating a mile offshore. The Israelis and Americans demonised the perpetrators of these attacks but continued to underestimate ...”

“... by occasional economic interdependence and mainly beneficent chance: the narrative structure that Robert Altman used in his film Short Cuts, set in Los Angeles, is here projected across the globe. Beneath the novel’s postcolonial multiplicity lurks a neocon assurance of the smallness of the world and the fundamental Westernness of all who live in ...”

“... wages they earn, the debts they face and the opportunities their children will or won’t have. Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis is even more closely attentive to the changes that economic and social transformation have forced on families, schools and communities.3 Putnam presents a series of case studies of parents and their ...”

“... without being deeply political. He published a book on Boswell and took to the Himalayas a copy of Robert Bridges’s wartime poetry anthology, The Spirit of Man. He was a brilliant but arguably reckless climber, personally responsible for seven Sherpa deaths in 1922, while making a run at the summit against all prudent advice. His failure to provision Camp ...”

“... explorers or scientific investigators; or slumming journalists (James Greenwood, Jack London, Robert Sherard and, later, Orwell) trying to share an experience that they could never penetrate because they knew they could always escape. And there was Dickens, who lived in denial about his childhood labour in a blacking factory and displaced his trauma onto ...”

“... the British reoccupied the East India Company’s settlement in Calcutta. In June a force led by Robert Clive deposed Siraj after defeating him in a battle near Plassey (Palashi), helped by the defection of the nawab’s key advisers and financial backers to the British side. The first account of the ‘Black Hole’ – as the room where the soldiers were ...”