“... and internment; several are old comrades whom he had believed dead. He is reunited with his friend Robert Hirsch, a legendary fighter who tore about Occupied France in SS uniform rescuing Ludwig and other refugees from internment camps and the pursuing Gestapo. Now Robert is managing a small electrical goods shop. He slowly ...”

“... too, that Bishop’s peculiar methods and achievement were somehow exemplary or corrective. Robert Lowell, also an early enthusiast, addressed Bishop handsomely in a poem of his later years as the ‘unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect’ – again the highest praise, and with an emphasis on her role as touchstone and ...”

“... was content to return to Hippocrates’s theory of an aetiology from ‘miasmata’ in swamps. Robert Desowitz recounts in some detail the discovery of the malaria pathogen transmitted to humans by the bite of the anopheline mosquito, and provides much fascinating information en route. Polynesia was malaria-free until Europeans brought the scourge in the ...”

“... weekly investigative column. The document was a copy of a pro forma shoplifter’s report from the Robert Simpson Company Ltd, which owns a department store in Toronto. The report was timed at 10.40 a.m. on 18 November 1975, and was in the form of a voluntary statement, as follows: ‘I Jeffrey Howard Archer do state that I took merchandise to the value of ...”

“... aposiopesis may be allowed as a structural feature, as when Yeats ends his ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ by claiming that he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends because ‘a thought/Of that late death took all my heart for speech.’ We may grant Yeats command of that trick and also say that to confront horror with irony calls for ...”

“... and philosopher of skully’, a form of hopscotch played with bottle tops. All this changes when Robert Woolfolk, an older boy ‘from the projects’, starts showing up on Dean Street. Almost immediately, he singles Dylan out: having threatened to steal his money, he makes off with his bicycle. But Dylan has his mother to protect him. Rachel grew up ‘a ...”

“... IOur stars on either side – herb robert, tormentil –The reeds we walk between are lovers whispering.IIThey shelter with us behind the drystone wall,The men who laid these grass-smothered boulders.IIIIn the far field a jackass and his jennetSafeguard the mare and her dozing foal.IVButterfly-orchid ghosts, sand-martin ghostsWhere the Owenadornaun used to flow ...”

“... as if they’d just invented it. You might want to take that for granted, but you shouldn’t. Robert Taylor didn’t get to say ‘fuck you’ in the first American Pacific picture, Stand by for Action (1942). And neither did Anthony Quinn in Guadalcanal Diary (1943). There wasn’t a single ‘fuck you’ to be heard in the whole Pacific submarine ...”

“... conceal their wish to take over the kingship. As for the king, at the start of the books that is Robert Baratheon, the huge bruiser who, with help from the Starks, deposed the previous king 17 years before the story begins. That monarch, mad King Aerys, was the last Targaryen on the throne; the Targaryen dynasty rode to power in Westeros hundreds of years ...”

“... Queens, a plain middle-class house where he lived with his widowed mother and his younger brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. He was known in the neighbourhood as a loner who collected odds and ends, as a silent member of the Christian Science Church, as a ‘scary kook’, as a haunted-looking man who was friendly to children. One visitor to ...”

“... and another shove with that metallic rush of blades. In American films of the 1940s and 1950s, Robert Ryan (1909-73) seemed one of the angry men of the war who never quite grew reconciled to the life that came after. He lived in North Hollywood too and I may once have caught a glimpse of him. Was this the reason his face looked familiar the first time I ...”

“... Writing letters was not the work Robert Lowell thought himself born to do, but what with one thing and another – good friends, a lively mind, deep troubles – he wrote a great many of them, demonstrating at considerable length ‘the excitement of his intelligence and the liveliness of his prose’. These are the words of Saskia Hamilton, the poet who has undertaken the arduous and complicated task of editing this selection ...”

“... that Johnson was in the picture angry black delegates and labour leaders rushed to protest to Robert Kennedy, who flatly denied the story. John Kennedy waited until the nomination was safely behind him before he approached Johnson directly. LBJ, whose advisers were telling him to turn down the offer and stick to his job as majority leader in the ...”

“... ruled by the Romanovs. ‘What was Russia? And what was Russia’s part in the Soviet Union?’ Robert Service asks in his introduction. But there are no answers to these questions, only – as is frequently the case in this rich but sometimes inconclusive work – a series of options. ‘For some witnesses the Soviet era was an assault on everything ...”

“... For example: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, James Wong Howe, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin and Leo McCarey all attended a reception in July 1943 for the Soviet director and administrator Mikhail Kalatozov. At that time Russian and American propaganda methods dovetailed nicely, and everyone seemed to approve ...”