“... all. Afghanistan will become a necessary war even if we do not know what marks the necessity. Robert Dole, an elder of the Republican Party, has said he would like to see Petraeus as the Republican candidate in 2012. Better to keep him in the field (this must be at least one of Obama’s thoughts) than to have him to run against. For Obama to do the ...”

“... influenced by the famous one in Michael Mann’s Heat, set in a coffee shop, where Al Pacino and Robert de Niro, policeman and gangster respectively, take a break from their total war and find some conversational common ground. Von Braun admires the model rockets and lunar capsules made by the narrator’s grandfather. Yet Chabon, having set up the ...”

“... clear.’ There is much more than nothing here. And the legal-investigative team put together by Robert Mueller, the former FBI director and now special counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference, includes lawyers with formidable competence in the scrutiny of money laundering and ‘financial forensics’ generally. A certain doubt ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a Labour leader, when fighting to win a general election?’ ITV’s excitable political editor, Robert Peston, asked the same day. It was bracing stuff, and if you’re sympathetic (perhaps even if you aren’t; Brexit and Trump are at the back of everyone’s minds, after all), it makes you sit up and wonder, however fleetingly: could he do it?In ...”

“... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...”

“... low life – and is tough to render into English. The various versions around are very different (Robert Chandler reprints William Edgerton’s). Translators have to give the same attention to minutiae as those metallurgists of Tula, while also communing with the writer and the work. Polizzotti is also part-cryptographer, Oulipian in tendency if not a member ...”

“... who executed fifty prisoners by blowing them from guns after the Kuka outbreak in 1872. Sir Robert Davies, O’Dwyer’s predecessor as lieutenant governor of Punjab, defended Cowan wholeheartedly: ‘Blowing from a gun is an impressive and merciful manner of execution, well calculated to strike terror into the bystanders.’ Mountstuart ...”

“... routinisation of inoculation was, however, a provincial affair, led by a Suffolk surgeon called Robert Sutton and, especially, by Daniel Sutton (1735-1819), the second of his six sons. The Suttons were a family firm: all the sons, and some other relatives, were involved in one way or another. It was the Suttons who industrialised the practice of smallpox ...”

“... were quite often written down. In the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, the Scottish nobles warn King Robert that if he should let them down and ‘yield Scotland or us to the English king or people’, they will dethrone him and choose another. ‘We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than us to accept you as our king,’ the Aragonese ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... US government position’ was ‘We are in Berlin by right of conquest.’ As late as 1966, Robert McNamara briefed the president that one of the objectives of US military forces in Europe was to discourage ‘the revival of German militarism’. Douglas Lute, the US ambassador to Nato under Obama, was even more explicit. The alliance ‘fundamentally ...”