“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... poets, he had a religious sense but no religion, except for the White Goddess, whom he found in Robert Graves. Having experienced an epiphany, he had a strong though not entirely easy personal connection with this goddess, believing she would ensure that he would never have a happy love, and that he would die at 29. Michael Bakewell, the agent he settled ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... simulos’); one president has converted, another is in jail. It is a vision not unlike that in Robert Bly’s recent poem ‘After Reading “The Sleepers”’: The corporate criminal sleeps in his cell, Our dim-witted president, out of touch with reality, sleeps . . . The Iraqi whose house was destroyed sleeps in a room elsewhere with fifty ...”

“... and admiring and funny reminiscences by Auden’s friends, notably in the Conversations of Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, hardly sentimental, inexperienced or patient observers of the human scene. The comments on Auden display only in an extreme form the mentality at work here, with its incapacity for understanding, accuracy or minimum ...”

“... American ideology. In ‘The Purposes of American Power’ (Foreign Affairs, Winter 1980-81), Robert Tucker claims to be steering a new course between proponents of ‘resurgent America’ and ‘isolationism’. Yet for the Persian Gulf and Central America he proposes a policy of frank interventionism, since, he says, the US can ‘allow’ neither ...”

“... in. In the 1770s, there were a hundred Campbells in Jamaica; it may be recalled that at one time Robert Burns was on the verge of joining them. Migration of ‘Scotch-Irish’ – a term coined before the end of the 17th century – to North America was ‘one of the most remarkable folk movements in history’, Calder writes; and in wars with Indians they ...”

“... his forced departure in 1987, Kincaid found herself on combative terms with his successors, first Robert Gottlieb and then Tina Brown (‘Joseph Stalin in high heels’). She accepted a job as professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard, a position she still holds. She got divorced. And she devoted more time to her garden. In the opening ...”

“... sexual offences by GIs in the UK, including 126 rapes, were documented, though the sociologist J. Robert Lilly has argued that only 5 per cent of rapes were reported: he estimates that between 1942 and 1945 US military personnel raped almost 2500 women in Britain, more than 3600 in France and more than 11,000 in Germany. Anti-Black racism meant that African ...”

“... house in Cheshire and his mind would all his life pullulate – like that of his mother’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson – in a ‘nursery-sickroom atmosphere’. His father, a captain in the York and Lancasters, was killed at Ypres in May 1915. His maternal grandmother, Emily, was ‘a great psychosomatic virtuoso’. And his mother Kathleen’s ‘intense ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... On its inside wall was a hand-painted scroll featuring the famous couplet from ‘To a Louse’ by Robert Burns: ‘O wad some power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us.’The documents Barr and Painter rescued from the Broadway are now in the Moving Image Archive in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall, once the home of the city’s annual carnival and ...”

“... years’: the time between the public record of the birth and baptism of his twins in 1585, and Robert Greene’s published attack on him (which shows that Shakespeare was finding theatrical success) in 1592. E.A.J. Honigmann suggested that Shakespeare went north to join a household affiliated as he was to Roman Catholicism. This strikes me as too romantic ...”

“... On the main stage Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who advises the US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, said it was ‘highly likely’ that the Covid vaccine was ‘a significant factor in the cancers in the royal family’. During a live recording of a podcast for the Telegraph, Allison Pearson accused the police of having ‘tampered’ with ...”

“... Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript collections. The flames from a fireplace had caught on the wooden mantelpiece and spread to the wainscoting. Hapless librarians were throwing water on the blaze; the city fire engines were nowhere to ...”