“... and a vigorous force on the folk music scene.) In 1935, the year of the general election, Robert Conquest stood as the Communist candidate in the mock election at Winchester and Frank deputised for him during the campaign. Some of the teachers were happy to see the boys thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that ...”

“... getting dressed next door to Nijinsky at a club swimming-pool in Bar Harbor, the set-designer Robert Edmond Jones was surprised by a knock at the door: I open it. A middle-aged man stands there, exquisitely dressed in fastidious nuances of pearl grey which harmonise with the tones of his silvery, scented moustache. He is tall and willowy and his delicate ...”

“... the Love Child of Camilla Parker-Bowles and Wayne Rooney. She who every morning plays a gallant Robert Browning to my late-rising, half-paralytic Elizabeth Barrett – get thee up from thy bed, thou fat lazy kitten-slug, and take that nun’s twat off thy head. Here, I’ve bought thee a clip-on pedometer and thou wilt walk ten thousand steps up and down ...”

“... biography may have something to do with that: the sense – Virginia Woolf’s sense, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and Dostoevsky’s – that nobody is simply one thing. Some people write biographies, you suspect, as a way of not writing about themselves. Lennon’s book is good in that way, in the fresh, clarifying, non-Boswellian way of letting ...”

“... entered the federal prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, where he discovered Scientology, read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and first heard the Beatles. From Scientology, he took ideas that he would combine with Carnegie’s: let the other fellow think he was an immortal spiritual being; exploit his traumatic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her onto The Tonight Show along with Petula Clark and Dionne Warwick; he had been going to ask Robert Kennedy but didn’t because she hadn’t liked his brother – she was a supporter of Eisenhower and Nixon but also of LBJ, calling herself ‘one of his most fervent admirers’, Vietnam and all. She was an old lady now, New York State’s Senior Citizen ...”

“... Treatise of Government is ‘slavery’, a fate to which Locke thought the political theory of Sir Robert Filmer condemned everyone except monarchs. Still, Machiavelli’s influence on the American revolutionaries is plain. His description in the Discourses, memorable in the way of oxymorons, of the way the tribunate made the Roman republic ‘more ...”

“... to the ‘lineage history’ (vamshvāli) which is a strong tradition among Keralan Christians. In Robert Eric Frykenberg’s Christianity in India, vamshvālis are described as orally transmitted pedigrees which ‘claim hereditary authority within certain elite families, through which kattanars [pastors] and metrans [bishops] descended from one generation to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... industry was created in 1976 ‘over a couple of beers’ at a bar, in a conversation between Robert Swanson, a 29-year-old venture capitalist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. Working with the Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen, Boyer had helped to develop some elegant recombinant DNA technologies which ...”

“... sources, more likely to cite Mao than Muhammad: in Afghanistan he was known for giving lectures on Robert Taber’s 1965 study of guerrilla movements, The War of the Flea, once a favourite of the IRA. Al-Suri, Lia writes, was ‘a dissident, a critic and an intellectual in an ideological current in which one would expect to find obedience rather than ...”

“... which are unable to address the original chaos he delights in. In the same way he tells Plath that Robert Graves has ‘a kind of disinfected enunciation, a crumb accent no less, states everything so far under that nothing at all is heard’.In these letters his love for Plath, for her ‘ponky warmth’, is absolute; in one letter he moves from describing a ...”