“... into transcendental meditation and gets written up as a Muscovite avatar of a character out of Robert Stone or Joan Didion: Often silences fell between us. Much of the time I felt that she was not in my company at all, nor I in hers. She would close her eyes for long, still minutes, smiling crookedly … I don’t know how she conceived of me. She only ...”

“... in the colonies that would have been impossible in Germany. The Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist Robert Koch had no difficulty injecting a thousand East Africans suffering from sleeping sickness with dangerously high doses of arsenic every day in the search for a cure, with predictably high death rates among the subjects. Indeed, ideas of racial ...”

“... linguistic innovation, what Kurt Tucholsky called its ‘atmosphere of unwashed feet’ and Robert Musil praised as its ‘human smell’. Fallada revels in the use of such practically untranslatable North German idioms as sich einen hinter die Binde giessen (‘to pour yourself one behind the bandages’, meaning ‘to get drunk’), Leute in den ...”

“... was the portrayal of Caligula in BBC Television’s 1976 adaptation of I, Claudius. In his novels, Robert Graves had exploited the ancient allegations that Caligula had a suspiciously close relationship with his sister Drusilla. The inventive Jack Pulman, author of the screenplay, went even further. In a terrifying scene that has no source either in ancient ...”

“... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on ...”

“... by the right-wing pundit and Goldwater acolyte George Will and a cheeky afterword by the liberal Robert Kennedy Jr), Goldwater’s collection of inspirational speeches pays rereading. The Conscience of a Conservative laid the groundwork for the Republican resurgence, and its encomiums to free enterprise, liberty and national might shaped the agenda of the ...”

“... succeed in warding off his prime fear, that of splitting the Tories. ‘I cannot become another Robert Peel in my party,’ he moaned. Well, the party split anyway, and unlike Peel, Balfour had achieved nothing. In the same way, the Declaration for ever associated with his name, which derived from his long-standing friendship with Chaim Weizmann, contained ...”

“... did Helms introduce him to senior figures in the CIA, but he set up a meeting between Amit and Robert McNamara, then the defense secretary: McNamara found Amit’s arguments persuasive, and he conveyed them to Johnson the same evening. The president understood that Israel was going to act; he set up a special task force to handle the situation, headed by ...”

“... tradition alike (with more than a hundred pages of endnotes citing work by the likes of Tom Nairn, Robert Crawford and Brian Doyle), this is an examination of the writing produced across these islands during the crucial century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at last legally ...”

“... owned a van’. The couple married in 1937 when Beth fell pregnant; the child, a boy called Robert, died. Two years later, they had Cora and after the war, opened a newsagent-tobacconist-cornershop called the Cabinette. Twenty years later, Janice is a toddler and Eddie is increasingly flailing, violent, drunk. Shortly before Beth and Janice leave for ...”

“... drove so many prominent men to acts of such lustful folly. Her conquests included Franz Liszt, Robert Peel (son of the prime minister), the French newspaper editor Alexandre Dujarier, Marius Petipa (the creator of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker), the Earl of Malmesbury, the Count of Schleissen, Lord Brougham (once described as ‘the ugliest man of the ...”

“... his mortality.’ It was 1967. Walt Rostow averred: ‘Victory is just around the corner.’ Robert McNamara, not sure this was so, resigned the office of secretary of defense to become head of the World Bank. H. Rap Brown claimed of the black riots in Newark and Detroit that they were a dress rehearsal for revolution. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana ...”

“... office, came out so swiftly and in such polished form that the constitutional historian Robert Stevens has speculated that they must have been in preparation before the changes were announced. No doubt there is always an advantage to government in starting a process of consultation and reform with some of the major facts already accomplished; but if ...”

“... meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth’. The incestuous children in The ...”

“... if dates were delivered up front. So Greenblatt wishes us to believe that Falstaff is based on Robert Greene, who infamously described Shakespeare in 1592 as ‘an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’. Greene died shortly after spewing out his Groatsworth of Wit, and Greenblatt has it that Will bided his time, but eventually had his revenge by ...”