“... by that of their mother and they represented a form of capital accumulation for slave owners. Robert Wedderburn, a radical agitator and Unitarian preacher, provides one of the few voices articulating the sense of loss, bitterness and anger aroused by these ugly practices of power. His pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery, written as an act of restitution to ...”

“... enjoyed by elected representatives. The leading theorist of democracy in the 20th century, Robert Dahl of Yale, was happier with the term ‘polyarchy’ – the rule of the many – as a description of the way democracy functioned; a responsive system which enables the inclusive, procedural reconciliation of multiple interest groups. Dahl’s ...”

“... elaborate fantasies. To me he seemed downright satanic at every turn. He also put me in mind of Robert De Niro in Heat, delivering a professional bank robber’s answer to a cop who asks him if he ever intends to go back to prison: ‘You see me doing thrill-seeker liquor store hold-ups with a born-to-lose tattoo on my chest?’ Sommer was nearly that ...”

“... treated his heroine without mercy. In The Testament of Cresseid, a sequel by the Scots poet Robert Henryson, Cresseid is reduced to prostitution and – by counsel of the gods – stricken with leprosy. Chaucer borrowed the plots of both ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and Troilus and Criseyde from Boccaccio, who was still alive during his first trip to ...”

“... St Guinefort, patron saint for the protection of children. Many sainted characters dream of bliss: Robert Browne, an 18th-century astronomer, of the young Jesus getting into bed with him; St Catherine of Siena of marrying Jesus, who gives her his foreskin for a ring (the lack of self-awareness among our pre-Freudian forebears is prelapsarian; these nocturnal ...”

“... remained in place and were quickly overwhelmed by local militia and a contingent of Marines led by Robert E. Lee. But Brown’s demeanour at his trial for treason, where he cited the Bible as his inspiration, and his subsequent execution, made him a martyr in the eyes of many Northerners. He had made the gallows ‘as glorious as the cross’, Ralph Waldo ...”

“... as often as through the calculations of strangers.’ She has very good things to say about Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992) too, in which the Germans win the war and cover up the Holocaust. The novel keeps testing the difference between not knowing of such matters and not caring about them: ‘Indifference,’ Gallagher says, ‘is the modality of ...”

“... in the coastal village of Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking ...”

“... 20th century, among them Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette Howland, born in 1937, a Jewish writer from a working-class neighbourhood in ...”

“... When the surviving German war criminals were put on trial at Nuremberg, the American prosecutor Robert Jackson told the judges that ‘the real complaining party at your bar is civilisation.’In 1945, the victorious Allies faced many of the same problems they thought they had faced in 1918. But the destructive effects of ‘barbarism’ were now greater ...”

“... to the possibility – and it shows up.’ Her poems first came to light when she sent them to Robert Hayden, the first African American poet laureate. She won a Discovery Award, which was presented at the 92nd Street Y, followed by a dinner in Claudette Colbert’s apartment. This prize led to the publication in 1969 of Good Times – the first of ...”

“... She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she attended a meeting of the ...”

“... business to subsequent generations. His favourite daughter, Sukey, married Erasmus Darwin’s son Robert, and their son, Charles Darwin, imbibed his grandparents’ experimentalism and willingness to challenge convention. Darwin’s interest in evolution and inheritance may also have been influenced by his family’s health troubles. He married his first ...”

“... account to the chancellor of the University of Paris.‘It was 1420; experience was crumbling,’ Robert Glück writes in his experimental novel Margery Kempe (1994), in which he fuses his affair with an aloof younger man with Margery’s love for Jesus. You might say that Glück channels Margery channelling Christ. Glück asked friends in his circle to write ...”

“... But why, at this point in our culture, do we choose to invoke the dog, the ‘prime secret’ of Robert Graves’s druidic triad? Why, by granting it attention, do we need to indulge this elemental whose jaw, once locked, has to be broken open with a specially-contrived wedge? ‘The first beast was like a lion ... and they were full of eyes within.’ Eyes ...”