“... base except the archetypal white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established ...”

“... to a head in July 1967, when the ufologists uncovered a memo in which Condon’s right-hand man, Robert Low, argued that the study should be staffed ‘almost exclusively by non-believers’:although they couldn’t possibly prove a negative result, [they] could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the ...”

“... sentiment has lent an animating spirit to several worthwhile works quite beyond the Song of Songs: Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe and Ron Hansen’s lavish and subtractive Mariette in Ecstasy and Anthony Oliveira’s recent Dayspring. You also just cannot say things like that at the breakfast table. ‘Christ is a sensuous being with a sensuous mother and a ...”

“... Trump, for example, was backed by billionaire venture capitalists such as Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer; Le Pen notoriously received support from a Russian bank with close links to the Kremlin. But questions remained as to how the world described in Undoing the Demos, governed by managers and number-crunchers, related to the one that emerged soon ...”

“... by Matthew Paris, the monk of St Albans. Any biographer is spoiled for choice among the sources: Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, Thomas Wykes of Osney, Alderman fitzThedmar of London – all of them salty and unrestrained in their comments, whether on the uselessness of Henry as a war leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the ...”

“... style, echoing Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, whose satirical nihilism was all the rage. Pym and Robert Liddell, a close friend from Oxford, wrote reams to each other in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s brittle manner, relishing her exposure of the tyranny of family relations; she had a Stevie Smith phase too, mimicking the bubbling prose of Novel on Yellow ...”

“... trapped in copper tubes. Or the oracular brazen heads supposedly created by Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. These heads were forged from bronze or brass and activated with the help of arcane knowledge of spirits or celestial conjunctions. Once operational, they were able to predict the future and answer any question. But stories ...”

“... except as a version of what television has accustomed us to call ‘fictionalised documentary’. Robert Phelps was able to construct a perfectly coherent autobiography from Colette’s scattered reminiscences, and present The Earthly Paradise as if it were, not an imaginative parallel to her life, but the real thing. All Colette’s biographers, even ...”

“... in this edition. Those interested in creative writing may consult ‘Two Housman Torsos’ by Robert Conquest, TLS, 19 Oct. 1973. Those with a taste for highly creative writing should seek out A.E. Housman: New Poems [sic] ed. [sic] by John Edmunds, with a preface and notes by Hilary Bacon (San Francisco, 1985).Every word, bracket and comma here is so ...”

“... Sex and death mingle in ‘The Haystack in the Floods’ when Jehane is captured with her lover Robert. She sees a ‘long bright blade without a flaw/Glide out from Godmar’s sheath’ and cut Robert’s throat, who ‘moan’d as dogs do, being half dead’. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, one of the most prolific shaggers of ...”

“... roll costs in the supermarket to how much it costs when bought in bulk: clear evidence of a scam. Robert Jenrick recently released a video of himself wandering around Stratford tube station confronting fare-dodgers (more scammers), which included a gnomic reference to streets full of ‘weird Turkish barbers’. In fact, this was a reference to another ...”

“... even where it presumably hurts them to do so; both the Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George and Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of Compact, spoke out against the suspension of Dean while objecting strongly to her views. But notably absent from the letter in support of Dean were the signatures of many prominent free-speech warriors, including ...”

“... must sacrifice their freedom so that the species as a whole can be protected. (As the philosopher Robert Nozick put it, ‘utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for humans.’) The conservationist logic is at its most compelling at an aquarium like Monterey, with its state of the art research centre, environmental policy unit, and public education ...”

“... the empire. Until the war began, tolerance and compromise kept many of those visions on hold. In Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna just before the war and a monument to the Habsburg polity, Ulrich, the protagonist, has been ‘accustomed his whole life long to expect politics to bring about not what needed to happen, but rather ...”

“... The alternative is to leave the field to mavericks and charlatans. The US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has claimed that Lyme disease was created as a bioweapon by a military lab on Long Island, convened a roundtable on chronic Lyme disease last December and announced that ‘the gaslighting of Lyme patients is over.’ Speaking at the ...”