“... to work.In testimony before the Senate, where many of the Republicans pointedly do not wear masks, Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, admits that the failure even to attempt ‘containment’ in late January, February and March – as South Korea and other nations had done – led to ‘mitigation’ (shutting down the country). This, of course, is contrary ...”

“... of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. Southmere Lakeside and the soothing water features contrived by Robert Rigg as part of a GLC initiative in the 1960s had turned sour by the time of Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Dystopian violence overcame the innocence of Corbusier-influenced architects and planners hoping for a brutalist iteration ...”

“... tune of about £650,000. Between Agnew’s place and Sandringham is Houghton Hall, family seat of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... the bodies of your friends. Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids ...”

“... notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s urging. Almost certainly, after the Spanish Civil War, he seemed to ...”

“... sounds very simple: put up shacks and hideaways in places so obvious that nobody will notice them. Robert Macfarlane, who lodged in a black hut assembled by urban explorers wearing orange hi-viz overalls during the fuss of the London Marathon, called his windowless shelter an ‘urban bothy’. The crew survey the territory as thoroughly as the developers with ...”

“... to be, a collector of literary young men (‘These Gardners are the kind that hunt lions,’ Robert Frost, her next target, said). She was acting for her daughter in this matter. Months later, Brooke offered to have lunch with Mrs Gardner. Phyllis went too and was entranced, ‘carried along on a kind of irresistible current’. She knew nothing of his ...”

“... literary works to his own poetry and prose, from plays by Aeschylus and Shakespeare’ to works by Robert Louis Stevenson and Machado de Assis. Since 70 per cent of the Portuguese population was illiterate, this was always going to be a struggle. Pessoa paid little attention to costs and ‘his creditors were pounding on the door, almost from the day the Ibis ...”

“... and Marvin were sleeping together,’ quoting Mary Frank, the wife of the photographer Robert Frank (with whom he did a phone interview): ‘It was so horrible that it was always unspoken but understood.’ He also quotes the photographer Saul Leiter (whom he interviewed face to face): Diane ‘talked about it. I think she had a conversation with ...”

“... Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol (the future godfather of neoconservatism) and the cultural observer Robert Warshow, whose essays on the movie Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret ...”

“... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder ...”

“... and continuity, Manzoni shaped Birmingham as few other British cities have been shaped. Like Robert Moses in New York, he was without sentimentality or apparent social concern. The starkness and cheapness of Birmingham’s appearance today is owed to his relentless driving in of aggressive roads and driving down of architectural quality. Chamberlain’s ...”

“... the 1951 film adaptation of Show Boat. When the sheriff arrives to arrest Steve Baker (played by Robert Sterling) for being married to Julie LaVerne (played by Ava Gardner), the leading lady in a riverboat revue who we learn has ‘negro blood’, he pricks her finger, sucks her blood and proclaims that he now has ‘negro blood’ too. In Mississippi, where ...”

“... between public and private bodies occurs when Jim Garrison, still in shock from witnessing Robert Kennedy’s assassination on television, is finally able to make love to his at last sympathetic wife. The hyperactive perversity of the prostitutes in Jack Ruby’s night-club and the Sadean fantasies of Clay Shaw’s parlour are finally matched by the ...”