“... thy remnant shall fall by the sword … Thus will I make thy lewdness to cease from thee.’ Sir Robert Anderson, in charge of the investigation in its early stages, later wrote in his memoir that his chief suspect was a ‘low-class Jew’. But this man, whom he does not name, was almost certainly Aaron Kosminski, who was incarcerated in an asylum though ...”

“... a grizzled and garrulous 1960s Californian sage who seems to have escaped from the later work of Robert M. Pirsig (Lila rather than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). The passing landscape remains real, but the secondary figures in it are so insubstantial that only Kellas and Astrid are alive, and their surviving vigour sometimes seems in ...”

“... the country’s emerging counter-culture, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Robert Creeley. It also ran a selection of the early work of a maverick graduate student in English at the University of Tulsa, Ted Berrigan. Berrigan was soon accompanying Brainard and his fellow editors, the poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, on their forays ...”

“... May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his prose writings, but his first poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, composed on 3 December 1914, opens with a version of the ...”

“... and the other artists who could be considered Yiddish modernists – the painters Nathan Altman, Robert Falk and, for a time, El Lissitzky, the composers Lev Pulver and Moshe Milner, the writer who called himself Der Nister – were defined by the struggle to integrate these two tendencies. ‘Our first imprimatur is our modernism, our leftism and our ...”

“... a few years ago as the diabetic daughter in Panic Room. And all the girls are squealing at Robert Pattinson – the noble Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter films – as Edward: hair quiffed, face powder a shade or two too light, modelled, I thought, on Prince William on a night out at Boujis, laughing fondly down at Kate Middleton when she can’t ...”

“... Cage watched the Happening unfold, his eyes were drawn towards a series of all-white canvases by Robert Rauschenberg that were pinned to the ceiling, and the idea of a piece without any ostensible ‘musical’ content was born. Cage’s increasing infamy through the 1950s was largely due to 4’33”, which premiered a few weeks after the Black Mountain ...”

“... Rod Kedward’s important books on the Resistance in his bibliography, he makes no mention of Robert Gildea’s subtle exploration of the nuances of ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ in his groundbreaking work Marianne in Chains (2002). Gildea showed that most French people were simply trying to survive and adapted in myriad ways to the reality of ...”

“... of Kennedy’s best and brightest, which was meant to balance out the number-crunching prowess of Robert McNamara and the Whiz Kids. In his dozens of books of American history – several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one ...”

“... bizarre proportions when, in 1923, learning that he would be present at a dinner for Ezra Pound, Robert Desnos, author of Pénalités de l’enfer, turned up with the serious intention of killing Cocteau. In the end, his desired victim didn’t show up, and Desnos tried to plant his knife in Pound’s back; he was restrained and escorted out. The incident is ...”

“... Kenneth Bainbridge said after observing the Manhattan Project’s first nuclear detonation. But Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’ It’s easy to imagine Trump liking the sound of that. Or are we insufficiently worried because we now find it harder to envisage the precise form that a nuclear ...”

“... as Collier and Fielding put it; while Harriet Smith’s painful awareness that her suitor Robert Martin hasn’t read the right sort of books (‘I believe he has read a good deal – but not what you would think any thing of,’ she admits to Emma) shows the snobbery behind superficial learning. What the Cry – and by extension polite society at ...”

“... of the Street. At times, the Rome that Long has unearthed from the documents looks oddly like Robert Musil’s Kakania.Yet as Piers understood, many individual projects succeeded, in a distinctively Roman way. In antiquity, aqueducts – gently sloping down to the city from springs and lakes in the Alban hills – had filled the city’s fountains and ...”

“... next, a romantic comedy at the pictures after that. The so-called ‘morbid’ age was also, as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge suggested in 1940, when calling their social history of the interwar years The Long Weekend, an age of mass pleasures, of the lido, rambling and cycling clubs, the first holiday camps and the dance hall (the ‘Lambeth Walk’ was the ...”

“... true to history. In Norfolk protesters muster at Wymondham, where their leader, the yeoman Robert Kett, decries illegal enclosures while declaring his loyalty to the Edwardian regime. ‘Christ’s blood, sir, we’ll open the Protector’s eyes to the true state of things,’ he promises Shardlake and his company, grimacing at their finery and soft ...”