“... is another purpose to the book, aside from the obvious; Hughes’s big bang may be a distraction. Robert Frost once confided to his friend Sidney Cox that ‘I have written to keep the over-curious out of the secret places of my mind both in my verse and in my letters to such as you.’ With his verse and his letters it may be that Hughes, too, has satisfied ...”

“... we can do this depends not just on the conditions in which we die, but on how we have lived. Robert Maxwell probably departed this world in circumstances which, in any literal sense, made the whole notion of such performance quite irrelevant. But even if he had passed away in bed with all his faculties intact, it is doubtful that be would have been able ...”

“... recording their fashionable clothes, pink cheeks and languid arrogance. Some, like the master of Robert Burns’s ‘Twa Dogs’, had set out in a ‘frolic daft’ simply To make a tour an’ tak a whirl To learn bon ton and see the worl’. But the ostensible purpose of the Grand Tour – a term coined in the mid-century – was the completion of a ...”

“... creative urge, at its most interesting when most devious. He was certainly a double man. (Robert Louis Stevenson had perceptively commented on ‘the note of ambiguity and deceit’ which already ‘brooded over’ Taken from the Enemy.) And a more than Edwardian richness, as well as ambiguity, broods over Susan Chitty’s ...”

“... fear of stimulating anti-semitism turned Leo Frank into a gentile Yankee businessman. But Robert Rossen, the young Jewish Communist who adapted the story for the screen, didn’t forget what he saw as his own betrayal of the Jews. A decade later, directing the first Hollywood Jewish/black buddy film, Body and Soul, Rossen made the last shot of They ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... kneecapped and executed those they suspected of being informers for the British state. Captain Robert Nairac, a member of the army’s undercover 14 Intelligence Company, apparently frustrated with the lack of information he was getting from the RUC, decided to go to a pub in South Armagh one Saturday night in 1977, a pistol hidden in his clothes, in an ...”

“... the success couldn’t last. In 1968 the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from Robert Ho Man Kwok of the US National Biomedical Research Foundation. ‘For several years since I have been in this country,’ he wrote, ‘I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant.’ Fifteen minutes or so after ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne ...”

“... 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 ...”