“... he’s good at having it both ways on a larger scale too. Reptilian black-ops masterminds out of a Robert Stone novel as well as bumbling CIA bureaucrats, baroque deaths in the bush and casual killings by the side of the road, historical and magic realism, sex and violence and a more ‘sophisticated kind of art’: the guy’s got it all. If HBO can do him ...”

“... Harry in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. He had several contacts at Broadmoor, including an orderly, Robert Neave (‘Tipster Bob’), whom he paid £9000 to supply him with news about the Yorkshire Ripper and other killers. The investigation had found an email suggesting that Pyatt paid a Thames Valley police officer – never traced – £1500 for a tale about ...”

“... government of the day. The OBR was set up to correct that tendency. To run it, Osborne brought in Robert Chote, who had been head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a highly respected think tank which analyses government tax and spending plans and reports on them in a spirit of Cassandra-meets-Scrooge. In June 2010, the OBR predicted that the UK economy ...”

“... think of two men: Boris Johnson clowning so effectively towards office, like an idiot emperor from Robert Graves – and David Mills, spirit of place, who knew just when to step ...”

“... know enough about foreigners to be able to tell if they were whom they claimed to be. Moreover, as Robert Service reminds us in Spies and Commissars, in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident ...”

“... had been intended to prevent. One of the Union’s founding fathers, the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, once spoke of the need to ‘detoxify the relationship between France and Germany’; now, the nationalist toxin is back virtually everywhere in Europe. Nobody at this point can or, for that matter, even really wants to move forward with ‘ever ...”

“... by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet. Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any sense, especially when it came to pornography and drugs. The ...”

“... sub-state; the counterfactual fantasy of Ireland’s future under the Third Reich awaits its Robert Harris, but there is plenty of material to hand. Bew needed a volume, not a chapter, for the story of the two Irelands between 1923 and 1966, and much goes unavoidably missing, including the resistant strains of Irish liberalism and dissidence which ...”

“... I lack musical intelligence – for which I don’t even have genetics to blame. My older brother, Robert, is a successful pianist. Or, to quote my book Beethoven’s Kiss: Dr Train, the psychoanalyst my father had me see when [my brother] Steve killed himself, once told me, after having determined that my mother hadn’t caused my homosexuality, that the ...”

“... make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. The birds evoked in her elegy for Robert Lowell, ‘North Haven’, have no trouble performing their elegiac function: The Goldfinches are back, or others like them, and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song, pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes. More distracting is the ...”

“... sense. Such communities are a decisive survival tool, because they embody what Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, in Not by Genes Alone (2004), have described as ‘ultra-sociality’. Human ultra-sociality is quite different from the communal networks formed among so many other species. As Durkheim showed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, homo sapiens ...”

“... to judge the continent by its worst leaders, like Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir or Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who also luxuriates in China’s support. During the run-up to Zimbabwe’s last national election, China offered the government riot gear and jamming devices to use against the opposition’s radio signal. ‘We have turned East where the sun ...”

“... a little aloof (‘a kind of hidden stranger among his New York intellectual peers’, Robert Alter very perceptively said of him, in a slightly different context), was prepared to write the story of his generation. When he had lived long enough and seen enough, when the fates of his contemporaries had played themselves out enough, it fell to Kazin ...”

“... broadly right, even if it is far from the mainstream view among the Anglo-American commentariat. Robert Kagan, for example, remains bullishly confident of America’s supremacy in his new (and ruefully titled) book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.* He believes that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the ...”

“... that was it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I ...”