“... What then is at stake in Pakistan as far as Washington is concerned? ‘The concern I have,’ Robert Gates, the US secretary for defense, recently said, ‘is that the longer the internal problems continue, the more distracted the Pakistani army and security services will be in terms of the internal situation rather than focusing on the terrorist threat ...”

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”

“... could be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost of Evans haunts Pandora’s Box, which covers the time some perhaps premature ...”

“... of regional co-operation’. ‘There is a strong feeling in the United States,’ said Robert Gelbard, Clinton’s envoy to the Balkans, who first mooted bombing Yugoslavia, ‘that Milo Đukanović has done an extraordinary job, has been a real hero, in terms of his role in building Montenegro as an independent democratic state, a country that is ...”

“... most successful attempt in recent years to reconcile Indigenous and left political theory is Robert Nichols’s Theft Is Property! (2020). The problem, as Nichols argues, is that the Marxist left has long detected traces of anarchic romanticism in Indigenous claims about dispossession, claims that too closely resemble the arguments made by Proudhon on ...”

“... for the state’s next bright idea. When last I peered into it from the entry booth I felt like Robert Lowell outside the Old South Boston Aquarium – ‘Its broken windows are boarded ... the airy tanks are dry.’ The arcades themselves still fight, quixotically, to keep the spectacle at bay. The beautiful Passage Véro-Dodat, where new Daumiers once ...”

“... nothing but ‘growing threats to the American peace established at the end of the Cold War’, as Robert Kagan, a former State Department official under Reagan, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote in an essay collection called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy, published in 2000, the election ...”

“... mean anything so precise as that.’ Later, Eliot wrote: ‘I must confess I was not thinking of Robert Browning when I refer to “a familiar compound ghost”. I was thinking primarily of William Yeats, whose body was of course brought back to Ireland after the war.’ He confirmed that ‘When I left my body on a distant shore’ was a reference to ...”

“... thinking a thatched roof was the height of exotic. Everything changed for me with the discovery of Robert Burns: those torn-up fields out there were his fields, those bulldozed farms as old as his words, both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual ...”

“... backwardness of the French countryside down to Bloch’s own time.Some fifty years later, Robert Brenner was to develop the kernel of Bloch’s insight into a magisterial comparative analysis of the variant property relations thrown up by class struggles on the land across Europe, and their consequences for the development of agrarian capitalism ...”

“... his apparent surprise at the horror in the Euro-American world that greeted his appointment of Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador – quickly rescinded – was simply the reaction of a man whose lifelong habit has been to isolate health work from all other forms of politics. This attitude might sound cynical, or naive, but it could just as well be seen ...”

“... under Johnson would be any more promising. Unlike the outgoing Defra ministers Michael Gove and Robert Goodwill, Johnson is not seen as an ally to farmers, who fear being squeezed slowly out of the market by the free trade deals he talks up. When negotiating new trade deals with global agricultural producers, notably the US, unrestricted access to the ...”

“... bureaucrats were constantly obliged to mingle and find common ground. The economic historian Robert Millward points out that the popular notion of nationalisation in Europe as a 1940s phenomenon, driven by the perceived failures of capitalism in the 1930s and the successes of the planned economy in wartime, ignores the earlier history of state direction ...”

“... is now. Photographs were key, and Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting weights ...”