“... 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 ...”

“... it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert Dodsley recommended memorising it as an exercise in mental self-training. In Derzhypilsky’s production, having been performed beautifully in its familiar Q2 position in the third act, the soliloquy got an encore at the end of Act V when Hamlet, still not ...”

“... itself? The Complete Poems provides a capacious answer. The volumes have been superbly edited by Robert West and run to more than two thousand pages. There were moments when I felt – to borrow a line from one of the late poems – that ‘there’s too damn much of everything.’ But I also found myself wondering why Ammons isn’t read more outside the US ...”

“... is now writing a soon-to-be-bestselling crime novel with plenty of sex and murder. Her husband, Robert, often rudely called ‘Rob’ by unthinking friends, is a highly adapted commuting machine who works in Canary Wharf and times his drive to the station to perfection. She is interesting, he is not. And they have a child, Lanny, who is both interesting and ...”

“... it was the intrinsic prelude to any sort of European union. In his Declaration of 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister from 1948 to 1953, proposed in words drafted by Monnet, Pierre Uri and others, that ‘Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an ...”

“... querulous and troublesome dependents: the blind poet Anna Williams; the drunk and morose physician Robert Levet, commemorated by Johnson in a beautifully spare poem of 1782; a young black servant, Frank Barber, whom he sent to school at his own expense, and to whom he left a large sum of money; and the ‘surly slut’ Poll Carmichael, probably rescued from ...”

“... Winter’s Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and ...”

“... race.’ ‘This calm declaration of a dying man was so well calculated to do mischief,’ wrote Robert Southey, who was among the crowd that morning. It convinced Southey that ‘revolution must inevitably come, and in its most fearful shape.’ Many had arrived at the same conclusion. Through the 1790s, war with France had ground towards a costly and ...”

“... are audibly mapped.There are also thousands of memorable moments, some distinguished by hindsight (Robert Maxwell declaring: ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it’), some by the way radio forefronts every tic, hesitation and obfuscation, and some by personal revelation. In 2020, as Covid added a piquancy to the ...”

“... la Mare, although his illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of ...”

“... handles polarities of ideology and thought – between appalling racists, such as Carlyle and Robert Knox, and enlightened liberals, such as Mill and James Mursell Phillippo – but also manages to connect these bodies of thought to the changing circumstances of location, climate, daily life and general social history. Partly because the reader has been ...”