“... buildings could be seen almost everywhere in Paris. Marcel Proust was born in 1871, his brother Robert two years later. We might think a marriage between a rich Jewish girl of 21 and a well-established Gentile doctor of 36 was unusual, and so said something striking about both partners. The marriage was Jeanne’s family’s idea, it seems; no members of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at any rate in the case of Israel). The greatest fears of right-wing nationalist gurus such as Robert Kagan concerned the future emergence of China as a superpower rival – fears lent a certain credibility by China’s sheer size and the growth of its economy. As declared in the famous strategy document drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz in the last year of the ...”

“... 1990, which introduced sulphur dioxide trading. Economists such as MIT’s Richard Schmalensee and Robert Stavins of Harvard’s Kennedy School also became involved. They didn’t simply advocate a cap and trade scheme, but helped it gain political acceptance. The 1990 legislation differed from what economists might have wanted in two respects. First, there ...”

“... In Praised Be Our Lords, he quotes a letter he wrote from jail in 1969 to Philippe de Saint-Robert, a Gaullist of the left and the author of Le Jeu de la France, which he had just been reading. The letter was signed off by ‘an ordinary young Frenchman who, because he loves his country and its people, went to Bolivia. Everyone plays … in his own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with an unusually low cover price subsidised by her own royalties. She picked a picture by Robert Capa for the cover, a young man lying dead on a heap of rubble, and composed a line of text to run underneath it: ‘A scandal that has lasted ten thousand years’. Within a year of publication, the book had sold 800,000 copies and was being discussed all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stirred up a public outcry against continued government secrecy. The then director of the CIA, Robert Gates, promptly ordered the release of a large number of files to the National Archives. Later, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act requiring the CIA and FBI to release virtually all records even tangentially related to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had shrunk to the darkened upstairs room in 50 Wimpole Street from which she would elope with Robert Browning. Her letters to him allude to the ‘blind hopes’ for the future that Prometheus speaks of in Aeschylus. She hoped to escape her isolation, not just to marry, but to realise her creative potential. She did not want to be crushed by a falling ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he tried to grill the Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork on his voluminous writings on constitutional law. Biden offered to resign, but Thurmond and Kennedy told him not to. Bork’s nomination was thwarted, but Biden was still chairman four years later when George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas. The ...”

“... genius seems to have been first sparked by reading a good though now mostly forgotten book, Robert Currie’s Genius (1974), which analysed with panache the Romantic invention of the phenomenon and its diverse aftermath in 20th-century avatars such as Samuel Beckett and Adolf Hitler. The lonely artist inhabits a superior aesthetic realm, Currie ...”

“... these antique grounds. Income tax was reintroduced in the early 1840s by the Tory prime minister Robert Peel, who argued that a modest levy would actually help protect property from more severe despoliation in difficult times. Once the danger was past, it could be repealed, as Peel proposed to do after three years. Of course, all times can feel like ...”