“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... because he is the least known of the writer-critics, and his French is often not straightforward. Robert Baldick, biographer of Huysmans (1955) and translator of his most famous novel, À Rebours, described his style as ‘one of the strangest literary idioms in existence’. Léon Bloy, a fellow writer and fellow Catholic, described it as ‘continually ...”

“... uninhibited generals and proconsuls, there was also a tradition of cynical candour, beginning with Robert Clive himself. His barefaced defence to the House of Commons select committee inquiring into the Company’s practices – ‘My God, Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation’ – set a high benchmark. But the villainous ...”

“... So Verity has ‘shame is no good companion for a needy beggar,’ while the more garrulous Robert Fagles (whose 1996 version has stood up pretty well, though it is not a line for line rendering) has ‘bashfulness, for a man in need, is no great friend.’ ‘Embarrassed restraint’ is better than these alternatives because it makes it so clear that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the atmosphere. In a prepared statement, the British chemist and former IPCC chairman Robert Watson, who served as the UN panel’s chairman, put it bluntly. ‘Let’s be quite candid,’ he said, ‘we’re not on the pathway to 2ºC. We’re on a pathway to 3, 3.5ºC.’ But maybe humans won’t be around to see the effects of the changes we ...”

“... grandmother, now had the time and energy and position to put it about that she was descended from Robert E. Lee. She became, like Hughdie, an Episcopalian. Jackie and her sister Lee had two mansions in which to cavort during their teenage years. Their status, however, was precarious. In the summer at Newport, for example, only Hughdie’s real offspring had ...”

“... freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with the ...”

“... a historian not a biographer, brings this out well – highlighting the powerful figure of Robert Wagner, who deserves much of the credit for the social security and labour legislation of 1935. A consummate politician, Roosevelt was moving leftward with the political tide. Equally characteristically, he intended to surf the waves rather than be pulled ...”

“... them to tell stories of torture that journalists demonstrated could not have been true. Lieutenant Robert Frishman said he’d been starved, for example, but he weighed the same after 18 months in the US as he did when he left captivity. Melvin Laird, the defense secretary, told stories of unmitigated horror. Seymour Hersh uncovered a Pentagon letter to pow ...”

“... 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 ...”