“... lift each other in a tentative balance, was advanced both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... court, and the Algerian struggle the ‘common struggle of all the colonised’. In this way, as Robert Young has recently argued, The Wretched of the Earth could become the ‘Bible of decolonisation’ for black activists and anti-colonialists around the world. Fanon was able to make this generalising move partly because of the ideas on ‘race’ which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.‘The murder of the ice-cream man violates all nature,’ Longley said in an interview, and his poem is ...”

“... to be sick. She took mothering classes and subscribed to Parents magazine. She had another baby, Robert, took guitar lessons and saw a psychoanalyst, Saul Miller, three times a week. Decades ago, one of Ethel’s previous biographers, Ilene Philipson, interviewed Miller. He told her that Ethel was attracted to analysis because she ‘believed that her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”