“... ethics survive Auschwitz’, shaken, challenged to the core, ‘but intact’, is the subject of Robert Gordon’s superb book. Its thesis is that very early in his career Levi moved beyond the language of testimony to the ‘language of ethics’, a ‘flexible, sensitive, intelligent language’ that extends his work on the death camps into ‘a ...”

“... him to various other forms of secrecy’. He was to become a government spy when Robert Harley was Lord High Treasurer (effectively Prime Minister) and he uses the word ‘secret’ obsessively in Crusoe (it occurs five times on one page). Novak sees his experience of prison and the survival strategies to which it led as crucial to his ...”

“... but he’s still bulletproof in Texas). The Gunter – another cattle king hotel – is where Robert Johnson made his first recordings, in 1936, and rock and roll was born. Eisenhower had an office in town, and he was in it on the morning he heard about Pearl Harbor. I don’t even think he was a general then. The San Antonio gangster Freddie ...”

“... two months at Tilton. Lopokova’s imaginative insights and spontaneous judgments appealed to what Robert Skidelsky, in his biography of Keynes, called the ‘liquidity’ of his mind. She didn’t pretend to understand his theories in detail but she responded to the patterning of his thought. His final book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and ...”

“... evenings for more social recreation. Among those who wrote to Carpenter and sought him out were Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Forster, who became a close friend. By the time he made contact in 1913, Forster was already a well-known writer. He regarded Carpenter as ‘a saviour’. It is not hard to imagine how Merrill viewed all these adoring new ...”

“... restlessly up and down. In Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982), fantasist Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), on a first date with barmaid Rita (Diahnne Abbott), hopes to impress her by leafing through his autograph album. It’s not long before our attention drifts away from his dismal performance to the restaurant behind him, where two illuminated ...”

“... Few people’s reputations have been improved by the credit crisis. One is the BBC’s Robert Peston; another is Vince Cable. A third is Gillian Tett, capital markets editor of the Financial Times. Prior to the crisis, she and her team were the only mainstream journalists who covered in any detail the arcane world of ‘credit derivatives ...”

“... since he is a ‘vintner’, runs a tavern there). So does one of Frances Williams’s sureties, Robert Bowker (who is described in one entry as a carpenter and in another as a glover), while her other, a scrivener called West, lives a block away on Golding Lane. The gardener Richard Meade, co-surety for the three Frenchmen, is not far away either, being of ...”

“... software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word ...”

“... one day, he said, Mitterrand might get the job. Shortly before Mitterrand’s death, Robert Pesquet, a former member of the OAS – a far right terrorist organisation in Algeria – revealed that the incident was indeed staged and that he had been the fake assassin. The affair cast an unflattering light on Mitterrand’s character: he was ...”

“... of utter ruin. Branson’s line on Bower is that he got lucky a while back exposing the monstrous Robert Maxwell and is now trying the same trick on other prominent figures in the hope that lightning will strike twice. But Bower doesn’t portray Branson as another Maxwell. He never suggests he is a crook and he is almost admiring of the skill with which he ...”

“... Clinton’s. Nuland is married to the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, Robert Kagan, one of the leading promoters of the Iraq war. We may never know what Obama thought Nuland was up to when she flew in to the Maidan to pass out cookies to the protesters in Russia’s backyard. But the message has got around by now that Obama ...”

“... inhaling nitrous oxide – laughing gas. ‘Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxide!’ Robert Southey wrote to his brother, ‘I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder-working gas of delight.’ Davy considered whether the gas might be useful in surgery, but the power and tenacity of a humoral vision of the body made him think it would be ...”

“... too.’ Even his admirers could find it a strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but ...”

“... the site again. Iran has refused on the grounds that the basis for such an inspection is flawed. Robert Kelley, a former IAEA inspector, agreed: ‘The allegations that Iran carried out hydrodynamic experiments related to nuclear explosives in a large steel containment vessel [at Parchin] have questionable technical credibility.’ Parchin is a sensitive ...”