“... months later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had ‘Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’: he had ‘also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000’. As an alternative, Kristof cited the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... foreknowledge, fragmentary but direct, of events in the world before her birth, and the neonate Robert, in Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, not only remembers being born (someone ‘clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side’) but the preceding state of bliss – ‘never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around ...”

“... Le Roy Ladurie, whose Times of Feast, Times of Famine was published in 1971. A decade later, Robert Rotberg and Theodore Rabb published a trailblazing volume of essays, Climate and History, their mission to explore ‘an exciting frontier for reading and research’. Recently, the geologist Gifford Miller and his team at the University of ...”

“... Complaints (1591), Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592), Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1594) and Robert Tofte’s Laura (1597). Tofte is included for his title, but also as a representative of the many inferior warblers troubling the presses at this time. The glut of sweetmeats provoked a predictable backlash of anti-Petrarchan satire and parody. Among the ...”

“... himself from the Russia investigation, paving the way for his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel. Trump considers it a betrayal, not just because it threatens to undermine his presidency, but because it didn’t come up when he offered Sessions his job. ‘How do you take a job and then recuse yourself?’ Trump wanted to ...”

“... LSD to twenty inmates of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary nearly every day for 15 months. Robert Hyde at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital paid hundreds of students from Emerson, Harvard and MIT $15 each to drink a vial of liquid that might induce an ‘altered state’; in the aftermath, one of the subjects hanged herself in a clinic bathroom. As well ...”

“... The face we’re bound to recognise in this portrait is that of Byron’s great literary enemy, Robert Southey, the former Jacobin radical, now the Tories’ Poet Laureate, a man to whom Byron once declared: ‘With you I have nought in common, nor would have –/Nor fame, nor feelings, nor the very Earth.’ Behind Southey’s, though, as Cronin and McGann ...”

“... some amenable sponsors if she is to sustain her bid for freedom. Fortunately, the Wienie King (Robert Dudley), a lugubrious sausage magnate, is on hand to clear the improvident couple of debt; and the journey from New York to Palm Beach yields a multi-purpose Florida meal ticket in the shape of the unimaginably rich John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy ...”

“... the bonnet badge of a Morris Minor, in the middle of a roundabout on Garsington Road. It fulfils Robert Musil’s dictum that public monuments are ‘impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the eye to roll off like drops of water off an oilcloth’. It took me almost thirty years to notice it, and even then it was because I was thinking ...”

“... party had failed him; his grandmother died; the Cross-Bronx Expressway, built by the city planner Robert Moses, ripped through East Tremont, displacing five thousand people. In 1950, Bookchin joined a literary collective led by Josef Weber, a Holocaust survivor, who had brought together a group of former Communists to publish Contemporary Issues, a journal ...”

“... understanding view, and may even have accused Owen of cowardice, a slur that found its way into Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. But the army should be given credit for the treatment Owen received at hospitals in France and Hampshire, and then at Craiglockhart, where Arthur Brock implemented a regime that he called ‘ergotherapy’, a kind of ...”

“... isn’t perfect. There were fears that some witnesses were paid to testify. It was said of Robert Stuckye in 1604 that he was a ‘very poor man … that doth use now and then to cut a stick out of other men’s hedges’ – his word could not be trusted. Some had ulterior motives. In 1585 a fuller called Edward Potter acted as a witness in a ...”