“... verse. The treatise applies to Persian literature the sublime aesthetics of the Oxford Orientalist Robert Lowth, for whom the terse passion of ancient Hebrew poetry (Job and Psalms especially) had expressive powers unmatched by the regulated, decorous traditions of classical verse. Generous illustrations from the 14th-century poet Hāfiz decorated the work ...”

“... effort, a novel about a historian of the Nazis who is also a Nazi sympathiser – in 1995, Robert Kelly, in a somewhat grudging review in the New York Times, spoke honestly about the prompt reviewer’s quandary: ‘It is not much comfort to lay aside this infuriating and offensive masterpiece and call it a satire, as if a genre could heal the wounds ...”

“... a nod to the 1971 movie The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, one of the many adaptations of Robert Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, also a major influence on Night of the Living Dead). An enormous wall has been built across Manhattan, along Canal Street, and the area south of it, Zone One, is being cleared of undead to make it safe again for human ...”

“... as a Landser, a common soldier without any ideological motives. The otherwise unidentified diarist Robert R. recorded with evident unease the atrocities in which he had to participate in the war against the Soviet Union, including the shooting of prisoners and the torching of villages, but convinced himself that it was necessary to carry on fighting so that ...”

“... about evacuees or eyeing the shortcomings of a nation besieged. His sets and costumes for Robert Helpmann’s ballet Miracle in the Gorbals of 1944 were generally agreed to be the only things worth remembering about it. He attended rehearsals at Sadler’s Wells: ‘2 sharp pokes with broken bottles in the face then followed a sort of descent de la ...”

“... group’s appropriation, protested vigorously, as did an older generation of advocates such as Robert Duncan, whose work was heavily influenced by Zukofsky and who resented what he felt was brazen opportunism and a fundamental misreading of the poetry. There was quite a noisy back and forth for a while – great fun really. Scroggins discusses all this in ...”

“... made evident by the rise of high-return auctions, the most infamous being the 1973 sale of the Robert and Ethel Scull collection, which centred on Pop. Enraged artists saw none of the profits (with Hirst, in this respect, there has been a complete turnabout). After the recessionary 1970s, the anti-regulatory policies of Reagan and Thatcher promoted a new ...”

“... up to be Pierce Brosnan’s match, Cate Blanchett is rumoured to be portraying Mata Hari in a Robert Altman TV film, and Helen Fielding has created Olivia Joules, in her Bond-parody follow-up to Bridget Jones, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination.† There’s nothing of the Amazon about Olivia: she’s a curvy blonde, wears Prada and uses her ...”

“... the popular comedy The Cocktail Party: Eliot was now ‘a master of theatrical contrivance’, as Robert Spaight argued, or a superior sort of Buchmanite, as Desmond Shaw-Taylor alleged; or both at once. William Barrett, in Partisan Review, wished Eliot had followed the road he had opened in ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, and so avoided producing ‘the weakest ...”

“... been murdered in the camps found it hard to speak about their loss. In Germany, the 1964 trial of Robert Mulka – former adjutant to Commandant Rudolf Höss – and 21 others for crimes committed at Auschwitz enabled a new generation to confront the past, but in Britain and the United States it was only some years later that it became possible to broach the ...”

“... interest in the hidden dealings of the rich and powerful. Tiny Rowland, Mohammed Al Fayed and Robert Maxwell have all received the treatment and been carefully scrutinised. His account of Maxwell’s affairs delved into the murky depths, but he also kept a wary eye on the dubious ethics of the business world around the man, and produced an interestingly ...”

“... investigates the life and personality of the flakier of the two men who created AA in 1935. Robert Smith (‘Dr Bob’) was a proctologist, stolid by nature and a heavy drinker. William Wilson (‘Bill W.’) was a failed stockbroker and a fully-fledged dipsomaniac. At a Faustian moment in Akron’s Mayflower Hotel – poised between the bar and the ...”

“... even for a mega-rich guy. Newhouse wanted both respectability and profitability, and turned to Robert Gottlieb, editor-in-chief at Knopf (US publisher of Nobrow, for those keeping score), as the man to make this cocktail swirl. In a retrospect that is easy but exact, Seabrook sees Gottlieb as a transitional figure with a compromise strategy – to use ...”

“... predecessors. Others, including Halley and his London colleague, the irascible natural philosopher Robert Hooke, had the idea that orbiting bodies tended to move in straight lines while at the same time being pulled towards some force-centre. Only Newton fully exploited its implications. He defined forces by the changes they produced in the motions of bodies ...”

“... such as food aid and education, were inadequately related to the situation in the villages. Robert McNamara attributed the failure of the US in Vietnam to ‘a profound ignorance of the history, culture and politics of people in the area’. On these grounds a military disaster might have been expected in Afghanistan last year. Britain seemed better ...”