“... Duhauttoir; Françoise herself lent Danton some of the purchase price. A 1964 biographer, Robert Christophe, speculated that Françoise may have had a child by Danton, and that he paid an inflated price to settle his obligations. He certainly drew on the dowry for his upcoming marriage to Gabrielle Charpentier, whose father was a tax official and the ...”

“... living with his wife, Hetta, at Studio House, Hampstead Hill Gardens – in a set-up described by Robert Lowell as a ‘household [that] had a weird, sordid nobility that made other Englishmen seem like a veneer’. Empson’s idea of making lunch was to place an assortment of unpunctured cans of Chinese vegetables on the gas cooker, where they tended to ...”

“... the Observer hired him to report on politics in Western Europe (driving a Bentley with his friend Robert Blake) and then in Czechoslovakia (a Lagonda with the young Alan Clark). In Tuscany, on the first of these jaunts, he met Bernard Berenson, art collector and maestro of highly paid authentication. Berenson became an intimate friend, and their ...”

“... and arguably fending off recession. Second, along with the Clinton-era Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, he successfully lobbied for deregulation of the credit industry, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated investment banks from commercial banks. At the same time he blocked attempts to subject over the ...”

“... enough staying power to hold my own in the world.’ A ‘pale gentle frightened little man’, as Robert Louis Stevenson remembered him, Hardy had abandoned an exciting London career in architecture to return to his country home and his mother, then proceeded to marry against her wishes. His wife wanted to live in London, he in a village near home. Worrying ...”

“... also inspired two of the true jewels and masterworks of science fiction’s ‘Golden Age’ – Robert A. Heinlein’s stories ‘By His Bootstraps’ (1941) and ‘All You Zombies’ (1959) – may be less well known. In these stories the protagonist, travelling into the past (and having to do so repeatedly in order to try to correct the damage wreaked by ...”

“... me to lunch with the Sillitoes, around whose table were some visiting Russian literary types, and Robert Graves. I was even more silent than usual, having a marked taste for older, old men actually, and being quite overwhelmed by Graves’s grey curls and the beauty of his pronounced Roman nose, as well as his grave pronouncements about art and life, none of ...”

“... years. His character was no secret to the Americans. In a 1968 cable, the US ambassador to Congo, Robert McBride, wrote that Mobutu ‘has apparently risen in soufflé-like grandiloquence’. He continued to rise, thanks to his Western allies, who appreciated his hostility to national liberation movements in Africa. The pillars of his regime were the security ...”

“... Tory-led ministry seized on Swift’s talents. Suddenly he found himself the man of the moment. Robert Harley, the chancellor of the exchequer, employed him to write anonymously for the Examiner, a newspaper that spearheaded the government’s causes and attacked its enemies. Formally, Swift had switched sides and crossed party lines, but privately he had ...”

“... during the First World War to remove toxic elements from the body after gas attacks. In 2005 Robert Kennedy Jr, an environmental lawyer, published an article entitled ‘Deadly Immunity’, which posited a vast conspiracy between government officials and pharmaceutical companies to cover up the link between mercury and autism. The article was found to be ...”

“... used words such as ‘annihilation’ and ‘exterminated’. Around the same time, the writer Robert Heron travelled through Upper Clydesdale and concluded on the evidence of ‘certain marks’ that the now empty green valley ‘had anciently been a scene of agricultural industry and a seat of no inconsiderable population’.These desolating effects were ...”

“... Moore and Claude Cahun (1920). Thomson’s sharp sketches of the women’s intimates, such as Robert Desnos, Edouard de Max and Henri Michaux, are more successful than the cameo appearances or conversational allusions. Names like Hemingway or Lacan can’t be brought into play without making a thud or a clang. No doubt people at Paris parties in the 1920s ...”

“... with a deep, dense and white blizzard of fake prescriptions that quoted an email exchange between Robert Kaiko, the inventor of OxyContin, and Richard Sackler. ‘If OxyContin is uncontrolled, it is highly likely that it will eventually be abused,’ Kaiko wrote, with apparent concern. ‘How substantially would it improve our sales?’ Sackler ...”

“... Before making up his mind, Obama commissioned a report on the history of US covert operations. Robert Malley, then Obama’s Middle East adviser and now President Biden’s negotiator with Iran, read the CIA’s classified report. It was, he told me in 2019, a litany of failure. ‘I think there were one or two, out of I don’t know how many tens of ...”

“... subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really established him: it prompted Robert Lowell to declare him the best Irish poet since Yeats, and he was widely celebrated by the London reviewers, who seemed on the whole untroubled by the suggestion that the Irish might be constitutionally disposed to killing one another. Heaney didn’t ...”