“... to convey this understanding of history: even controversial figures like the rapacious conqueror Robert Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson was leaking news from National Security Council meetings. The defence secretary, Robert McNamara, who had initially advocated a moderate course, soon swung in line behind his uniformed colleagues, and gave the moronic authorisation for a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine to be bombarded with ‘practice’ depth charges.But Kennedy stayed the ...”

“... health’ products and vitamins. The anti-vax doctor Mark Geier, quoted extensively by Robert F. Kennedy Jr in his infamous Rolling Stone article, marketed bogus autism treatments, including chelation therapy, which draws metals from the bloodstream (Geier was stripped of his medical licence in 2011). Another widely promoted autism ‘cure’ for ...”

“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

“... in LA a few months earlier of his most likely challenger, the increasingly left-leaning Robert Kennedy. Then came the Manson killings. The LA Free Press defended Manson after his arrest as a victim of the local establishment, and radical LA seemed either to have succumbed to decadence, or to have run into the sand. Yet like many veteran ...”

“... the Atlantic Bridge lobbyist Adam Werritty, to official meetings; the current housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, remains in his job despite admitting ‘apparent bias’ in overturning a lucrative planning decision in favour of a Conservative donor he’d sat next to at a party fundraiser.Johnson has followed Cameron in promising to clean up Westminster but ...”

“... begins in 1954. Modelling himself on his father, who was one of the architects of the New Deal, Robert Wagner Jr won the mayoral race promising a ‘New Deal for New York’. Reforming the city jail system was part of his vision. Just as now, jails were used to manage unemployment and instability in working-class life, with young Black people and those of ...”

“... again.At a particularly stormy meeting of Tory backbenchers after Kwarteng’s tax-cutting budget, Robert Halfon accused Truss to her face of ‘trashing the last ten years of blue-collar conservatism’ by allowing her chancellor to scrap the top rate of tax and the cap on bankers’ bonuses. This missed the point. Cameron-Osborne were never blue-collar ...”

“... again as an interpreter (this time a passable one), working together with the Bible translator Robert Morrison for the mission of William Amherst. (Staunton and Morrison represent, for Harrison, embodiments of two different theoretical models of translation: on the one hand the exegetical Morrison, whose word-for-word approach produced stilted and ...”

“... stand for wind turbines being put up near their homes. It’s now mainly the Greens – especially Robert Habeck, the charismatic economy minister and the party’s de facto leader – who are trying to clean up the energy mess, while also pushing for a new ‘moral foreign policy’ vis-à-vis China. The Green base has been up in arms about the extension of ...”

“... a Bible in a tube of sunlight’. So, all right, there is no comma here – Morrison’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, said he was always inserting commas into her sentences and she was always taking them out again – but it is not so distinctive as the word ‘tube’. Thirty-four years ago, I stopped reading, right here, to puzzle whether this should be a ...”

“... Vera avoids instinctual behaviour. She is studying German with Anna because her Jewish father, Robert Kroner, who has lost control of his business following the introduction of the race laws, wants her to speak proper, cultured German (unlike her mother, a German woman from a modest family). Milinko, brought up by a poor widow, is taking lessons as part of ...”

“... to have been unable or unwilling to play the social game at which his friend and colleague Hubert Robert excelled. In his infrequent self-portraits, Fragonard preferred to depict himself in the same tondo format that he used to paint his wife, Marie-Anne Gérard; his sister-in-law, Marguerite (who moved in with the couple in 1775); his daughter, Rosalie; and ...”

“... every time it’s reproduced (the poet Craig Dworkin even commissioned a version on a rug). Robert Barry’s ‘The Space between Pages’ calls attention to its own material location in a different way. Carried in 1969 by the New York avant-garde periodical 0 TO 9, it was listed on the contents page, but readers searched for it in vain. The magazine ...”

“... in a Ship, as well as in the State’). A good woman was ‘like a ship’, the preacher Robert Wilkinson ventured, because ‘her countenance and conversation are ballasted with soberness and gravity’ – though she ‘must not have one quality of a ship, and that is too much rigging’.Beneath the bluster, however, was hard-nosed calculation. A ...”