“... the infrastructure of settled agriculture and thereby deprive the enemy of food and fodder. Robert Livingston in the wars against the Plains Indians had the same idea. He set ablaze the grasslands south of the Platte River in order to destroy the material support of his semi-nomadic enemy; he was using a tactic employed by Native Americans ...”

“... did Egypt’s usefulness in ‘extraordinary renditions’. In the words of the CIA agent Robert Baer, ‘If you wanted to make someone disappear – never to return – you sent him to Egypt.’) Suleiman is a redoubtable figure, but nothing he has said or done suggests a yearning for political reform. Nor is it clear that he is willing take over ...”

“... not astoundThe virtuous mind.Indeed I also find myself reflecting rather sadly about a couplet of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is what has been so often attacked in later years as child-cult, the literary man pretending to be a child to make himself look sweet: but I think the people who attacked this didn’t recognise the merit of the child cult when it is ...”

“... of his country in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan earthquake. Winding it up came a warning from Robert Bork against the menace of the ‘clerisy of power’ now (under the Ford Presidency) steering the nation towards the shoals of equality and uniformity. The following bumper issue of the National Review, on 5 December, was mainly taken up with the text of ...”

“... glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster reproduced in Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton’s collection shows the great hulk of the ship, sunlit, belching smoke out of three of its four funnels – the fourth was there only for effect – and cutting a swathe between a small sailing ship and a three-masted square rigger. A sliver of ...”

“... with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but ...”

“... citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad professors hang themselves. Thus poor Robert Nelson, author of a 1988 book on the novelist, gets mercilessly dinged for writing about Cather’s oscillation between a ‘phallocentric hegemony’ and a ‘vaginocentric’ one. (According to Nelson, as cruelly quoted by Acocella, Thea ...”

“... dabs of kerosene light and the occasional brace of headlights showed a city was there at all. Robert, an Armenian PE teacher who had befriended me in the coupé, took me through the frosty murk of Yerevan’s central station and into a doorway. In an instant there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their ...”

“... tries to rise to as a correspondent, giving exquisite elegies for old friends like Mrs Kemble and Robert Louis Stevenson; even the noble, scrupulous and harrowing account of his loved sister’s last days and hours is improved by an altered phrase. Some things probably came near to defeating him, though he records them desperately. Professor Edel chooses to ...”

“... had awarded him a grant). In fact, Schwartz vacillated over his book’s merits. He told Robert Hivnor that he was ‘in the middle of what will probably be the longest and worst poem in American literature’ and wrote to R.P. Blackmur that he was ‘publishing a blunder 261 pages long’. But to Berryman he confessed: ‘Every time I read or see ...”

“... both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused amphetamines.William was placed on the ...”

“... and uneasily, as ‘beautiful’.Lynch decided to become a painter after reading The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (Edward Hopper’s teacher), which convinced him that ‘the art life’ was the ideal form of American self-expression. This conviction carried him to art schools in Washington DC, Boston and Philadelphia, and briefly to Europe, on a failed odyssey ...”

“... makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the ...”

“... that have been coming out of one corner of the British Foreign Office for more than five years. Robert Cooper, who has written an essay in Reordering the World, was a senior policy adviser there (he recently left the Cabinet Office for the European Council, where he is senior civil servant for foreign affairs), and has become well-known in policy circles ...”

“... traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short: Robert Citron of Orange County, Toshihide Iguchi at Daiwa, Yasuo Hamanaka at Sumitomo and Nick Leeson at Barings, just to take examples from the early 1990s. In Leeson’s case in 1995, it was a huge unauthorised position in futures on the Nikkei 225, the main ...”