“... is unambiguously bad for growth but below which it is even slightly beneficial. Another study, by Robert Barro, finds that at levels below 15 per cent the effect on growth, though negative, is statistically insignificant (since the study was published in the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, however, its author has thought it prudent to cite the average ...”

“... fact. It was a charge perfectly commonplace among all who knew Ford, friends as well as enemies. Robert Lowell, who met him through Allen Tate near the end of his life, quotes the story of Ford, an over-age wartime second lieutenant, playing golf with Lloyd George and giving the PM a piece of his mind on golfing etiquette: had he refrained, he told ...”

“... It’s a dependable party game: who was the MP who sat from 1950 to 1987, emerged as a strong and early opponent of hanging and supported homosexual law reform; was fiercely anti-Nato, anti-American and opposed to Britain possessing nuclear weapons; pioneered the Clean Air Act, vociferously opposed subsidies to farmers, attacked the monopoly of the big drug firms as suppliers to the NHS and was the first person to take the anti-smoking cause to the Cabinet; became a vehement critic of Empire and hugely embarrassed a Tory government by a passionate condemnation of British treatment of Africans confined in the Hola Camp in Kenya? (The MP in question was so infuriated by the racist excuse that different standards applied in Africa that he/she actually cried with vexation at the end of the speech ...”

“... well above the knee’. That, too, is familiar. In They Came like Swallows, the older boy, Robert, is a natural athlete, but one of his legs has been amputated and he wears a false limb. And in So Long, See You Tomorrow, the narrator describes how, when his brother undressed at night, ‘he left his artificial leg leaning against a chair.’ In that ...”

“... well, since the tale is in substance almost unbearably violent and cruel, a manifestation of what Robert Frost calls ‘design of darkness to appal’. The central figure, Yoshihide, is a painter, a wholly disagreeable man who loves only two things: his art and his daughter. The daughter is a Lady-in-Waiting to the Grand Lord of Horikawa, whose particular ...”

“... relationships preserved, disputes prevented, standards upheld. ‘Over our community,’ wrote Robert Roberts of the Edwardian Salford slum, ‘the matriarchs stood guardians, but not creators, of the group conscience and as such possessed a sense of social propriety as developed and unerring as any clique of Edwardian dowagers.’ It was the same at the ...”

“... King was relevant to the killings in Vietnam. (I don’t know whether, or how, the shooting of Robert Kennedy was relevant: it may have been done by the Mafia.) In West Germany, that April, a student protester was shot, as a scapegoat: a dissident from East Germany, with Protestant Christian beliefs, Rudi Dutschke survived the attack for 11 ...”

“... arrange it, before emerging a free and in Thatcher’s eyes dangerously attractive man.) There was Robert Armstrong, saving her from this fiasco, if not from one of her more ridiculous but sinister attempts to sustain state secrecy – but all the while murmuring that he thought Aids the greatest challenge to any government in his lifetime. And then as the ...”

“... of the Union, wrote a few articles on economics, inherited the college fellowship of his tutor, Robert Hall, taught (inter alios) the undergraduate Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and entered Parliament in 1950 as MP for South Gloucester. It was a swashbuckling rise by a young man full of glamour. ‘I am more fond and proud of that young man than I can put into ...”

“... He then seems to have become involved with serious thinkers abroad, like Henry Oldenburg and Robert Boyle. We know that in The Hague he discussed philosophy with the libertines Charles Saint-Evremond and Henry Morelli, with Leibniz, and with people around the Prince de Condé. In the last four years of his life, when he was living in the home of the ...”

“... a light console, descended from these experiments. But we had to wait for the end of the century. Robert Wilson, designer/director of Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace, ‘a digital opera in three dimensions’ which has toured North America and Europe since it opened last year, says of this work: ‘I’m not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to ...”

“... out applause and ramming it through. No wonder the Liberals, and the Pan-Africanists under Robert Sobukwe, were appalled: a room full of black people had cheered the Charter through and felt empowered in the process, but a small number of white Communists had run the thing from start to finish. The Congress was their idea, they had organised it; the ...”

“... in 1700, but that had as much to do with his asthma as with his bent for reclusive philosophising. Robert Voitle’s meticulous 1984 biography suggests a bustling lord of the manor rather than an idle lover of landscapes. The estate was above all a large collection of farms, and their landlord seems to have been active, and rather enterprising, in ensuring ...”

“... with (and even now to require) active state intervention, social reform and higher taxes. Robert Morier even sought to reconcile Free Trade with Empire (an Empire bound together by ties of sentiment and affection rather than by material economic interests). Thus reinvigorated, it had no difficulty in seeing off the fair trade and bimetallist ...”

“... looks at how entrepreneurs produced a national literary heritage. The bookseller and self-made man Robert Dodsley, treated as a vulgar functionary by his authors, is, in Brewer’s eyes, a hero of literature. John Bell, cashing in on the end of perpetual copyright to produce elegant anthologies of poetry and drama, had more influence on the formation of a ...”