“... records or laying plans to snuff her out. Prominent among these writers are Milo Speriglio and Robert Slatzer (a bit of a cross-category-turn this last one: he claims to have been married to Monroe for three days). There is a new addition to this group, a hysterical book by Donald H. Wolfe which may just prove to be the conspiracy sub-genre’s reductio ad ...”

“... Rumsfeld in the wake of the mid-term elections, and his replacement as secretary of defense by Robert Gates, a member of Baker’s group, appears to testify to such a change. ‘Security’ in Iraq seems to have been reduced to its most basic meaning of safety from physical harm. Whether it’s a matter of Iraqi government personnel, of communities and ...”

“... belligerati, who ignore the more informed analyses of Manningham-Buller or the former CIA officer Robert Baer. If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Daleks were made the subject of two big storylines in the relaunched Doctor Who. In the first, Robert Shearman’s ‘Dalek’, the last living representative of the race is tortured by American operatives in orange boilersuits at an underground facility; he falls in love with Rose, the new Doctor’s main assistant, and comes to understand his ...”

“... when he was haranguing a brawling mob, with a few girlfriends in fur coats rushing for the exit. Robert Skidelsky, in his 1975 biography, attempted to mitigate Mosley’s culpability by arguing that the violence was ‘at least as much the result of Anti-Fascist demonstrators interrupting meetings or attacking Fascists’. In the original edition, Skidelsky ...”

“... look anywhere else. This was partly because of his quite deliberate scene-stealing manoeuvres. Robert Alda, the father of Alan, acted with Lorre in a horror film which has since become a cult called The Beast with Five Fingers. You ‘had to be prepared’ for his ‘little tricks’ all the time, Alda claimed. When other actors had turned away, you could ...”

“... house were very different from those of the Sheffield ‘burrow’ – they were described by Robert Lowell as having ‘a weird, sordid nobility’ – but of course it was much larger, and the company tended to be noisy and numerous, whereas in Sheffield he depended on his middle-class academic colleagues for talk and drinking company and even for ...”

“... right: yearning, and its bafflement, is far more present than dejection, and there are echoes of Robert Frost in the ways his conversational prosiness rises to its own kind of lyricism. But, poetry and prose taken together, he does now seem very much of his period, standing for a kind of Reithian ideal of poetry that would inform, educate and entertain. Like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”