“... Literary imagination here reconfigures the territory by reviving memories of this site or that. Robert Macfarlane has pointed out that the verb ‘to write’ refers, via the old English Writan, to a kind of incisive track-making. Thus one would originally ‘write’ by drawing a point across a surface of wood, stone or earth: by furrowing a track. In ...”

“... to have invented the phrase ‘male bonding’) is ousted from the second edition, as is Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot.One scoreline in the Yale Book is the most revealing of all: Plato 11, Mark Twain 154. The equivalent figures in the 2014 Oxford Dictionary are Plato 18, Twain 34. Twain spoke and wrote to be quoted, as did epigones of his such as ...”

“... on 22 October 4004 bc. Nor were ideas of ‘development’ new in themselves, and writers such as Robert Chambers, in his bestseller of the 1840s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, could run together an eclectic mix of geology, natural history and philosophical speculation to propose some kind of ‘evolutionary’ story. After 1859, Darwin’s name ...”

“... NoViolet Bulawayo​ intended to write a non-fiction account of the 2017 coup that deposed Robert Mugabe and made Emmerson Mnangagwa, his one-time deputy, the third president of Zimbabwe. But she couldn’t keep up with the changing political situation. There was a sense of bitterness: the coup wasn’t the new beginning many had hoped for ...”

“... it is hard not to detect a bit of that in Post Growth, which opens with a lengthy paean to Robert F. Kennedy, is close to dismissive of a socialist alternative, and leans heavily on the critical liberalism of Hannah Arendt (certainly no socialist). For Hickel, though, the tradition of democratic socialism – radical redistribution, public ...”

“... to have invented it. Late in life, he sent a copy of his most incendiary work, Biathanatos, to Robert Ker with a cautionary note attached: ‘It is a book written by Jack Donne, and not by Doctor Donne.’ It’s an irresistible formulation, with the snap and symmetry of an epigram, and it has become a shorthand for the puzzle of Donne’s mercurial ...”

“... Russia and Western Europe into an obedient lawn. For Putin, so far, the space is Ukraine. For her, Robert Burns’s evil ‘Auld Kate’, it was Poland, though not the compact Polish state of today. It was the enormous, ramshackle Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the ancient Rzeczpospolita or ‘kingly republic’. Its borders changed erratically, but most of ...”

“... The impression is rather like that which James himself registered after reading a selection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions … one smells the thing unprinted.’ James clearly matters to Tóibín more than any other novelist does, and The Master is probably his most self-scrutinising work. But you can see how ...”

“... has been no total war between major powers since 1945. The most prominent exponent of this view, Robert Jervis of Columbia University’s Institute of War and Peace Studies, argued that such wars can no longer occur if statesmen are rational. In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press suggest that these grand claims are ...”

“... failing to intercede on the victims’ behalf. This was the line taken in Massacre in Rome (and in Robert Katz’s book on which the film was based). Cosmatos and his producer, Carlo Ponti, were prosecuted for ‘defaming the memory of the pope’ and received six-month suspended sentences.Even more astonishing were the legal proceedings in 1994 against ...”

“... abandoned it.Among the more surprising heroes in Bailey’s account is the defence secretary Robert S. McNamara, mostly remembered today as a leading architect of the Vietnam War. A lifelong member of the NAACP, McNamara commissioned a study that found many examples of off-base discrimination against Black soldiers stationed in Korea and West Germany. He ...”

“... self-described ‘rational expectations revolution’ began with the work of Friedman’s student Robert Lucas. Keynes had put expectations at the centre of macroeconomics. If you wanted to understand how an actually existing market economy worked, you had to begin with what people expected the future would look like, because those expectations determine ...”

“... history, and its politics are not what you might expect. Last time I was in Colombia I carried Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics: a great help in listing questions about this old and battered democracy, if democracy is what the answers to his questions prove it to be.* ‘Old’? Competitive elections have been held in Colombia, on and off, at ...”

“... worth, less easy to make than it was. So one can argue that Hockney should not have been hurt by Robert Hughes’s description of him as ‘the Cole Porter of modern art’. He has been true to his talent, which is great, and avoided boredom for himself and his audience by turning to photography, computer graphics or Picasso when a line of development did ...”

“... the multitude.’ What’s more, Joyce might stand for the obscuring of story, the triumph of Robert Browning’s oblique ‘truth broken into pragmatic hues’ over the direct address achieved, he said, by his wife: ‘You speak out, you ...’ ‘The novelist had metamorphosed himself into an Artist, and described himself proudly as such. His novels ...”