“... sources, more likely to cite Mao than Muhammad: in Afghanistan he was known for giving lectures on Robert Taber’s 1965 study of guerrilla movements, The War of the Flea, once a favourite of the IRA. Al-Suri, Lia writes, was ‘a dissident, a critic and an intellectual in an ideological current in which one would expect to find obedience rather than ...”

“... which are unable to address the original chaos he delights in. In the same way he tells Plath that Robert Graves has ‘a kind of disinfected enunciation, a crumb accent no less, states everything so far under that nothing at all is heard’.In these letters his love for Plath, for her ‘ponky warmth’, is absolute; in one letter he moves from describing a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in prison. It was from the ‘visceral hatred’ of the ‘lean and hungry men of Grub Street’, Robert Darnton argued in 1971, ‘not from the refined abstractions of a contented cultural elite, that the extreme Jacobin revolution found its authentic voice’. Their hatred was directed not at the king and the nobility, but at the cultural elite of the old ...”

“... for the founders of American neoconservatism, the Yale classicist Donald Kagan and his sons Robert and Frederick, both of whom were influential in promoting the second Iraq War. And yet for the Founding Fathers of the United States, Hamilton and Madison in particular, Pericles was a warmongering imperialist who instigated and persisted in the fatal war ...”

“... gay male eroticism at the time. (It’s striking that, among the many names in Durbin’s book, Robert Mapplethorpe is not mentioned, even though he and Hujar knew each other and disliked each other’s work. Mapplethorpe said that Hujar’s photographs made him ‘cringe’, while Hujar was scathing about Mapplethorpe’s superficial ‘art look’ and the ...”

“... 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 ...”