“... American confidence. These were the years in which Stanley Fischer, acting as itinerant bagman for Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, would disburse stand-by credits and loans from the IMF, in sovereign disregard of its statutes, according to the political value to Washington of incumbent regimes around the world. The two chief beneficiaries of his largesse ...”

“... I visited the US Army Armor Center in Fort Knox, the colonel in charge of training recommended Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as ‘pinsharp’ on ‘the ethics and morality’ of the future soldiery) and step into plastic cabinets made by Jacuzzi to simulate warfare as it might be fought by ‘the Army after Next’. Meanwhile, the software ...”

“... beauty, sweet reason must veil their heads, they must give way to arguments of power.’ Robert Graves writes in his autobiography that, back in the hills of Harlech, he found himself ‘still mentally and nervously organised for war’, automatically sizing up the landscape for places to site a Lewis-gun and provide cover for his rifle-grenade ...”

“... and stars Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother who begins to fall apart after she and her partner (Robert Pattinson) move from New York to rural Montana. The photography is close and jittery and the sound claustrophobic. It has been described as a film ‘about’ postpartum depression, but it is far from being an issue film in the way that might suggest ...”

“... Dowland and Purcell, with a small debt to odd contemporaries like Kevin Ayers, Syd Barrett, Robert Wyatt.In​ Germany in the mid-1970s, Eno hung out with the Cologne experimentalists Can and collaborated with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (aka Cluster, aka Harmonia). Not long after Another Green World was released he was in Germany and ...”

“... that enabled him to ‘command tribute and hostages from them’ before skedaddling. Unlike Robert Graves, Suetonius doubts Claudius’ claim that under Caligula ‘he had deliberately pretended to be stupid’ as a cunning means of self-preservation. Graves goes too far in the other direction, glossing over Claudius’ nastier side: Suetonius calls him ...”

“... travellers carried it with them as a vade mecum or guidebook. Coryate met the adventurer Sir Robert Shirley in the hinterlands of Persia, and was chuffed when he took ‘both my bookes neatly kept’ from his luggage. In the autumn of 1612 Coryate left England, for what would prove to be the last time, en route for the East. Sometime before leaving he ...”

“... the Sun in 1969, after he’d bought the News of the World from the Carr organisation, defeating Robert Maxwell en route. The News of the World is a Sunday paper, so it was a point of elementary commercial logic to start a daily paper to accompany it, in order that the presses would not lie idle during the week. Larry Lamb, the Sun’s first ...”

“... endowed them. Before long Gay’s scrupulous historical habits began to spread, and by 1979, when Robert Darnton investigated the relationship between the Encyclopédie and the book trade in The Business of Enlightenment, it was clear that the study of 18th-century thought was changing out of recognition. From now on it would belong to professional historians ...”

“... Eritrea’s war of independence, waged against its imperial neighbour Ethiopia, lasted 30 years and ended in 1991. Often, in the British media, the case against covering the conflict was that if no one had heard of it, it couldn’t be worth the trouble. That kind of argument, which plumps the cushions for the proof to lie on, is hard to counter. Telling the story to a wide non-specialist audience is a daunting prospect and few people have tried; the most successful, until now, was Thomas Keneally, whose novel Towards Asmara (1989), set in the guerrilla-held areas at the time of the liberation war, was a picaresque homage to the Eritrean people ...”

“... prudent wait-and-see attitude from his observation post in Massachusetts. Unlike her predecessor, Robert Gottlieb, spatula’d out of the editor’s chair after five years, Brown wooed Updike, treating him to lunch at the Four Seasons, packed with men in power suits. The most Gottlieb ever offered was a sandwich in his office.Updike’s faith would be sorely ...”

“... made in the Caymans in the late 1960s. The book polarised reviewers. In the New York Times alone, Robert Stone said ‘its pleasures are many and good for the soul,’ while Anatole Broyard called it an ‘unrelieved bore’. Its formal experimentation had put Matthiessen at loggerheads with his editor at Random House, Joe Fox, who had done much to perfect ...”

“... of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and, Tennyson told Moxon, before its sensationalist precursor, Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, came out in 1844. Holmes is sceptical about this, thinking that Tennyson must have been reacting to Chambers’s observation that, within evolution, ‘the Individual … is to the Author of ...”

“... young.Ageism itself is a relatively recent concept. The term was coined by the gerontologist Robert Butler in 1969 to describe routine discrimination against the elderly, who had been left behind in the great wave of civil rights movements of the 1960s. Butler drew on the struggle against racial and other forms of injustice to make his case. He invoked ...”

“... Bindel called it in 2018 when the Olympic diver Tom Daley announced the arrival of his baby son, Robert, by paid surrogate in California. ‘The interface between extreme capitalism and patriarchy.’ It’s interesting, as Lewis is quick to notice, that the clouds of pale and puffy human-rights speak come spiked with moments of body horror, as though ...”