“... well as much of the Israeli public, regards as evidence of their humanitarian ethos. But not even Robert Menendez, one of the US Senate’s most redoubtable supporters of Israel, was persuaded. ‘I am deeply troubled,’ he said, ‘by reports of Israeli military actions that resulted in the death of innocent civilians in Gaza as well as Israeli targeting of ...”

“... to regain control of barricaded republican areas. Much to the chagrin of the British commander, Robert Ford, the IRA was thus enabled to fight another day – and a bloodbath was avoided. During the early years of the conflict the main tendency of this contact switched from operational discussions to high-level engagement aimed at a settlement.The first ...”

“... of The Old Child – which seems at first to be playing rather bookishly with motifs from Robert Walser and Thomas Mann – is also explained, though even after she has been unmasked as an adult, the central character doesn’t disclose her motives.As Erpenbeck tells us, these false childhoods can be interpreted in various ways. The old child might be ...”

“... the world?Behavioural economics proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s. Its early adoptees included Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his research on asset price volatility and the psychology of bubbles. Economics and psychology are now closer than ever, with new fields like neuro-economics using fMRIs to map the way the brain processes ...”

“... increasing supply; Joshua Gilpin introduced its use in the US in 1804. And in Paris Nicolas-Louis Robert invented a papermaking machine which, through the use of a conveyor belt, produced not single sheets but a continuous roll: the belt replicated the actions of the vatman and coucher, even the right to left, forward and back shake to distribute the ...”

“... a very strange scene in which an Amisian femme fatale sets out to turn Larkin on at a party in Robert Conquest’s flat. The femme fatale is called Phoebe Phelps. She’s presented as a slightly older woman for whom Amis had a troubling sexual passion between 1976 and 1980, which would make her a – perhaps the – model for Nicola Six in London Fields ...”

“... He replaced the glorious monsters of his early days at the club – Vieira, Petit, Sol Campbell, Robert Pirès, Freddie Ljungberg, the otherworldly Thierry Henry – with endless tiny midfielders and not very good defenders. From 2006 until 2015, he actively refused to buy a goalkeeper. He seemed wilfully blind to the massive hole in the midfield that ...”

“... work is universally described as the crown of all the works of the master’. By the time of Robert Stevenson’s Spanish Cathedral Music of the Golden Age (1961), ‘the master’ had become ‘a great genius’. Evidence of actual performances also began to increase, particularly in France, where Charles Bordes, basing his edition on Haberl’s and ...”

“... fire, destroying or damaging more than two hundred volumes from the famous collection of Sir Robert Cotton. As a result, some words of the poem are irretrievably lost, while others are known only from transcriptions made in the 18th century, before the charred edges had crumbled. Wellesley gives a stirring account of the Cotton fire, noting that heroic ...”

“... gestalt and entropy that later assemblagists indebted to Schwitters, from postwar artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely to contemporary practitioners – Isa Genzken, Thomas Hirschhorn, Sarah Sze and Rachel Harrison – have exploited in their own ways.Although Merz is an activity of excessive addition, Schwitters also presented ‘a special ...”

“... concedes that his continued abuse of reluctant ‘John’ shows that he did not love him), ‘Robert’ (who recognises the fraudulence of saying that ‘the boys aren’t really hurt’) and Matthew (who is ‘still very disgusted with people who want to have sex with children’) are all described by Dr Li as merely ‘ambivalent’ in ...”

“... left all his academic baggage behind. As a travel writer he inclines far more to Theroux than to Robert Byron, with Theroux’s delighted fascination with conversational absurdity and a comparable resourcefulness in undertaking an arduous trip. No car touring or sightseeing or cool drinks on the terrace. His is also a thoroughly English ...”

“... rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or even Peter Reading. And then the sweet, rapid brocade of Glyn Maxwell’s complex forms, or the grace of Pauline Stainer. These ...”

“... Once upon a time, a distinguished French Department in a well-known British university set a question on Diderot in its Final Examination. Owing to a couple of unfortunate misprints, his name appeared as ‘Piderst’. Understandably, it was not a popular question. But it did attract one answer, from a candidate who discussed the merits of Piderst with enthusiasm, if in rather general terms ...”

“... the workforce from which they were drawn. Such revisionist interpretations have been described by Robert Hughes as ‘normalising’ the convicts, and further instalments along similar lines can be expected; but no amount of normalising can remove the scars from the backs of the victims of the Antipodean Gulag. And while Hughes himself made significant ...”