“... did, it would only have been to see the interlocutor’s eyes glaze over in bored disbelief. As Robert Louis Stevenson remarked in one of his letters home from Germany, in that situation you just find yourself gabbling on about clanship, tartans, Jacobites and whatever else will make the necessary effect. Silence would imply oblivion – dismissal as an ...”

“... in a series of incidents that helped trigger the Civil War: events hauntingly recorded by Robert Payne, who was teaching at Lianda. Lung Yun, arrested and deported to Chungking, later escaped to Hong Kong. He ended his days, like Li Tsung-Jen, an honorific figure in the People’s Republic. In November 1937, as the Japanese swept the Nationalist ...”

“... losing face, being deep or superficial – get brought back weirdly to life.) The historian Robert Stradling pointed out some time ago that during the 44 years of Philip’s reign there was not a single day of peace; and most of the wars were far from being triumphs. This may be relevant.We might compare the lost face of Mars with that in another ...”

“... army, which was unhappy with the deal and thought it could get better terms. The next president, Robert Kocharyan, was more of a hardliner and refused to surrender the occupied provinces. For the Armenians, there was no way of legalising the status of the occupied regions, and they didn’t have the population required to settle the area. Yet they held on to ...”

“... writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same year, 1895. The postwar life has its doldrums, and for a biographer the narrative sails are hard to hoist. For his full-dress Life, three decades in the making, Dilworth adopts a chronicle approach, breaking his close-grained ...”

“... later Sartre’s secretary, shared his anger at a student protest in support of the Fascist writer Robert Brasillach, on trial for collaboration. (That Brasillach had once been a student at Louis-le-Grand counted more with their classmates than his anti-semitism.) Lanzmann and Cau formed a groupuscule with the future novelists Michel Tournier and Michel ...”

“... later. ‘Better go down dignified/ With boughten friendship at your side/Than none at all,’ Robert Frost wrote. Roussel’s boughten friendships with Janet and Dufrène explored the feasibility and not unsuccessful consequences of Frost’s idea. When La Doublure appeared it received almost no attention. The second review, published five months after ...”

“... universities to heel. From the mid-1980s, when the minister responsible for higher education, Robert Jackson, complained that universities were frustrating government efforts to ‘reform’ them by acting as a ‘cartel of producer interests’, successive administrations have sought for ways to make universities conform to their will. But these efforts ...”

“... began shepherding to publication the novels of Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget and Marguerite Duras, who were soon known as the ‘école de Minuit’. These writers drew on different models, but with their detached sensibility and rejection of 19th-century dramatic conventions, they had enough in common for Emile Henriot of ...”

“... too, but the war made its way into the nervous system of her poems indirectly and mysteriously. Robert Lowell was a high-profile conscientious objector, writing to Roosevelt in September 1943 with a ‘Declaration of Personal Responsibility’ which objected to the mining of the Ruhr Dams and the bombing of Hamburg. He concluded: In 1941 we undertook a ...”

“... country’s former serfs had acquired of moving from place to place in search of a better life. Robert Peel’s introduction of Britain’s first peacetime income tax in 1842 – just under 3 per cent on incomes above £150 a year – was, in retrospect, a breakthrough, if not one the protest movements of the era had demanded. For Peel, trying to marry ...”

“... was never going to get out of the land of disgrace, as Densher was never going to make any money. Robert Pippin, in an excellent recent book called Henry James and Modern Moral Life, summarises these dilemmas starting from Densher’s point of view.3 Pippin says Densher can’t take the money because he can’t, in the end, act ‘as if no great moral ...”

“... It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership ...”

“... called Brutalism? ABK were thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland ...”

“... him.’ The old dry wit had travelled with him.In Being Geniuses Together, written with Kay Boyle, Robert McAlmon remembered a visit to Dublin in 1925:In Paris, Joyce had introduced me to Patrick Tuohy, a portrait painter [who] had done portraits of Joyce and of Joyce’s father, and he was now conducting an art class in Dublin. While I was there he took me to ...”