“... 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 Once the danger was past, it could be repealed, as Peel proposed to do after three years.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 ...”

“... at other moments, his centuries-wide learning evokes the tradition of Erich Auerbach or Ernst Robert Curtius; and at still other times he takes his place alongside major contemporary scholars of American education and society such as Laurence Veysey, David Hollinger and Gerald Graff. Guillory opens with a respectful nod to Graff’s Professing ...”

“... history of promiscuity, it was his wife who left him. The same year, he assisted the photographer Robert Frank in getting a Guggenheim, the proceeds of which Frank used to make his own masterwork, The Americans, which not only self-consciously built on Evans’s book, but in some ways, which Evans surely recognised, surpassed it. Diane Arbus, another ...”

“... until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.The controversy made its way up to Robert Bellarmine, the great Jesuit theologian, who weighed in with a letter in April 1615. Bellarmine found the Copernican theory permissible as long as it was presented hypothetically as a device for tidier calculations, but not if it were positively asserted ...”

“... they are only slightly more so than my aunties’ insistence that we are descended from Sir Robert Peel, or my own thought, once voiced at Gilpin Place and briskly squashed by Dad, that Uncle Clarence, my mother’s brother killed in the First War, might be the Unknown Soldier.I still have much of Aunt Eveline’s music, albums covered in brown ...”

“... them. The word ‘graft’ has a double meaning here, both hard toil and a drug-selling syndicate. Robert Hesketh, a criminologist at Liverpool John Moores University, says the line between legal and illegal work is becoming blurred. Connor Chapman, at his trial, said about a Mercedes A Class he’d stolen: ‘Most people weren’t using that car to do crimes ...”

“... have been the first to think musically about punctuation. The eminent 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth had compared punctuation marks to rests in music. Period, colon, semi-colon and comma are ‘in the same proportion to one another’, Lowth noted, as semi-breve, minim, crotchet and quaver.The signature of Nelly’s performance as a narrator is the ...”

“... consequences of large families for poor households. In lines borrowed from the social campaigner Robert Dale Owen, she asked: ‘Is it desirable then, is it moral, for parents to increase their families regardless of the consequences to themselves or the wellbeing to their offspring when a simple, easy, healthy and CERTAIN remedy is within our control?’By ...”

“... team and [the] Kremlin’ – evidence that the dossier glaringly failed to provide.In May 2017, Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, was appointed special counsel to oversee the official investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. After nearly two years of exhaustive research, the Mueller Report found no evidence that ...”

“... Afflicted made their accusations against the witches quite spontaneously, but his contemporary Robert Calef, who went to watch him at work on Margaret Rule, has left a rather different account. Margaret Rule’s Affliction occurred about six months after the Salem witchhunt had subsided, but Mather presents it as a manifestation of the same diabolical ...”

“... that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its socket and eaten it); Robert Crabbe had lost several toes, which I did not think too serious until he explained they were required for balance (I understood balance in the negative context of not having enough of it, hence those shameful safety wheels fastened to my bicycle).At some ...”

“... been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up sometimes in the 1990s, but I ...”

“... words of English and fifty dollars in my pocket’. In New York, she took in work by Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and Yvonne Rainer. Babette Mangolte introduced her to the celluloid experiments of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. At Chelsea’s Elgin Theatre, they watched Snow’s La Région centrale on a ...”