“... library. Convalescence was transformed by a gift from his cousin, a copy of The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson.These glimpses were a romance of the road. Adolfo was feeding me titbits from twice translated interviews. But his portrait of Vaes, so decisively sketched, fired my selective misreading. The fiction of our weary march is that ...”

“... never left the drawing board. The Dyna-Soar was cancelled in 1963 by the then defence secretary, Robert McNamara. But the dream never died, lingering on in obscure budgetary allocations over ensuing decades, none of them yielding anything of practical use. Despite the bombast on both sides of what we have to call the New Cold War, current efforts will almost ...”

“... of an apparently seamless whole.If time isn’t continuous, it becomes barely recognisable. In Robert Coover’s great story ‘Going for a Beer’, barely a thousand words long, the continuousness is deceptive, belonging to language and not to the experience language claims to represent. ‘He finds himself sitting in the neighbourhood bar drinking a ...”

“... on much for a definition of humanity, since he has had so little time to meet any of the species. Robert Heinlein’s totally self-indulgent The cat who walks through walls (to be acquitted of malignant sexism only on the ground that it is also so innocently pubescent) has made its author two million dollars so far. The first volume of the new decalogy by ...”

“... have some answers) by writing. At first she reads books by men. Graham Greene, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘that man who wrote Heart of Darkness, whose name escapes me’.I hardly ever saw so much as a glimpse of myself in any of their books and I didn’t care to. I didn’t want to exist in books. I liked how the men talked to other men and ...”

“... touch such weathered stones of deep cultural time as Democritus and Lucretius, Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, conduces me, at least, to conviction: I can think of only a handful of films that have had the profound impact on me that Keiller’s London did when I first saw it in the cinema. With its acute intercuts of London’s raddled face – which even ...”

“... became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor speculates, ‘And if [this play] prove so happy as to please,/We’ll say ’tis fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am ...”

“... says, in ‘a race to the bottom driven by ever-receding profitability’. The Nazi politician Robert Ley said that ‘there is no longer such a thing as a private individual.’ Half a century after Ley’s suicide at Nuremberg, Morgan, as editor of the News of the World, ensured that this was the case in Britain. Every parasite has its parasite. Every ...”

“... the season. The effect followed partly from the translation of the Iliad they’d chosen, Robert Fagles’s from 1990. Fagles goes for the choppy, hard stuff, preferring percussive consonants and end-stopped monosyllables. Some of the pastoral and domestic similes were cut, and a few of the interpolated myths were dropped. The effect was to man up an ...”

“... decisions,’ argues Aziz Diop, the leader of a group of civil society organisations in Guinea. Robert Mugabe has used Africa’s Chinese moment as a pretext for postcolonial nose-thumbing. ‘We have turned east,’ he said in 2005, ‘where the sun rises, and given our back to the west, where the sun sets.’ Outside the structures of government, Africans ...”

“... Tyndall’s fellow Queenwood teachers, Edward Frankland, had been invited to work with the chemist Robert Bunsen in Marburg, and in 1848 Tyndall decided to join him in Germany and study for a PhD, using his savings from railway surveying. In Marburg, he rose at 5 a.m., sitting in the cold in a dressing gown lined with cat fur, and worked on ...”

“... to face her in round two – but voters, especially on the left, were taken with this argument. Robert Hue, a former general secretary of the Communist Party, and Patrick Braouezec, a charismatic reformer, called on party members to vote for Macron in the first round, rather than Benoît Hamon, the winner of the PS primary, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the ...”

“... and made contact with the American counterintelligence corps (forerunner of the CIA): his brother Robert had bills of lading which proved that the Russians were stripping East German factories and sending materials back to the Soviet Union. In 1948, on a trip home to Rostock, Kempowski was arrested by the NKVD and charged with espionage. The experience is ...”

“... in evolution about which opinion was divided but not generally hostile. It was 15 years since Robert Chambers had caused a sensation with the anonymous publication of his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria, and in his novel Tancred, where it features as The Revelations of Chaos, Disraeli parodied ...”

“... as rotten and the new monied classes as pox carriers. In ‘The Play-House: A Satyr’ (1689), Robert Gould attacks not only actors and prostitutes but also the surgeons who ‘heap up an Estate by our Debauches’, participating in the pox economy by charging ruinous amounts for ‘cures’: ‘Expensive Malady! where people give/More to be kill’d than ...”