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“... of a very interesting set of lectures: on cosmology, on TV, on the law, and above all on suicide. Robert Stoller suggested that the question the psychiatrist should ask of the trans-sexual is not, ‘Why you?’ but: ‘Why not me?’ Night Train is so accurately disturbing that it makes one ask the same question about suicide. And yet the most remarkable ...”

“... of sand. John MacLean, in whose kitchen-room bannocks cooking on the fire had been photographed by Robert Adam in 1905; his three children, Catherine, Mary and Allan, barefoot outside the little window; Donald MacKinnon, who made eight spinning-wheels out of oak driftwood in 1859: they lived here, between the silverweed pasture and the sea-strand of ground ...”

“... American films of the Forties, such as Body and Soul (1947), written by Polonsky and directed by Robert Rossen, or Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), exposed the corrosive effects of a culture devoted to money. The most overtly pro-Soviet films produced in Hollywood, Mission to Moscow (1943), written by Howard Koch, and Song of Russia (1944), written by ...”

“... armed clashes, allowing uniformed and armed Albanians to set up checkpoints. Once the US envoy Robert Gelbard had issued a statement that me KLA could be treated as a terrorist organisation, Milosevic had die perfect excuse for a crackdown: in March, he moved into Drenica with tanks and heavy artillery against unarmed civilians. After Drenica everything ...”

“... is ‘projection of power’ – but whose power? In the 1960s, the US secretary of defence Robert McNamara and the secretary of state Dean Rusk urged their British counterparts to retain British military forces in the Far East. The British ministers were reluctant, given that ‘the empire was no longer there to justify it.’ The current government ...”

“... He had then been put through the media wringer as head of the Senate judiciary committee during Robert Bork’s failed nomination to the Supreme Court. In February 1988 he had a brain aneurysm, then a pulmonary embolism, and months later a second aneurysm. Beau was in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania, and it had been a lonely time for ...”

“... most a few pages long, takes its first line from another writer (Arthur Conan Doyle, Marie NDiaye, Robert Walser). In the course of this repurposing, Serre seems to shed her fabulist narratorial armour. Good things happen: a mother becomes unrecognisable – more affectionate and practical and chicken-roasting – overnight; a therapist turns out to be a ...”

“... of Bowie figure for many younger listeners who may never have heard of Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd, Robert Pruitt or Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, before Solange referenced them. There’s a fascinating autodidact’s story there, I think, which is very different from today’s more usual social media dream of effortless, instantaneous global renown. Phillips charts ...”

“... It comes from encountering speech as an impenetrable wall – except it isn’t really, as Robert Frost knew. (He used the metaphor of people speaking through a wall, where you can discern the tone but not the words, in his ars poetica ‘The Sound of Sense’.)One could extract an entire book on Proust from Essays Two. When she agreed to translate Du ...”

“... patrial concept ‘was transparently designed to favour those with ancestral ties to Britain’; Robert Carr, the Tory home secretary, told his officials that it was politically essential that ‘our family ties with people in Australia, New Zealand and Canada should be given special recognition.’ The British Nationality Act of 1981 caught up with reality ...”

“... of sanctions as a tool of coercion has often been criticised within the US establishment. In 1997, Robert Pape, a political scientist much admired by policymakers, published the influential paper ‘Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work’. Pape argued that even the most severe economic measures would inevitably run up against nationalist resolve, and that no ...”

“... of the operations of art world and culture industry alike. More recently, the American artist Robert Gober has taken up Magritte’s way with simulacra – that is, objects that look eerily real but aren’t – in order to explore fantasies that are both private and public.I like the idea of Magritte as much as his art. David Sylvester, who oversaw the ...”

“... the camera), and because it showed to the full Karel Reisz’s sympathy for people who, in Robert Musil’s words, go out on an adventure and lose their way. This was a key element in all his films, whether they were set in Nottingham, London or Las Vegas. I think especially of the confused and manic Morgan in the film of that name, and of the driven ...”

“... But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for television and Lessing put together a selection. But by the 1980s, in the Dirty Realist era of ...”

“... of answers about the Yugoslav War. Democracy-promoting journalists like Michael Ignatieff and Robert Kaplan were pleased to learn from Djilas that the ethnic violence was the result of Tito’s failure to democratise the country when he had the chance. But they didn’t consider more disquieting problems presented by Djilas. The perceived selling-out of ...”