“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the history of the Civil War right – whatever that might mean – or by tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee across the South. The 2400 miles of Route 66, America’s most famous highway, pass through only one state in the former Confederacy, Texas. Yet in 1936 the first edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book identified half of the 89 counties along the ...”

“... italicised phrases recollected from the once famous courtroom speech of the doomed Irish patriot, Robert Emmet, Bloom counting off like Rex Stewart or a rocketeer: ‘One. Two. Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa.’ Joyce’s political point about gaseous rhetoric and false consciousness is analogous to Stewart’s lionising of Haile Selassie.Although most ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Here is how a popular ‘sex hygiene’ guide for young people put the matter in 1917 (it is Robert Willson’s The Education of the Young in Sex Hygiene): ‘The boy who can look his father and mother fully and laughingly in the eye, who can throw his shoulders back and breathe deep, that boy who regards his father as his comrade and his mother as his ...”

“... a work co-authored by two pillars of the foreign policy establishment of the time, Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, whose first edition – it went through many – appeared in 1977. Though presented as a system of norms and expectations that helped assure continuity between different administrations in Washington by introducing ‘greater discipline’ into ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were often strong, his taste, whenever it took off on its own – the early enthusiasms for Robert Natkin, the later advocacy of Arthur Boyd – was unerringly awful. Either way, it hardly strengthened his cause. Take another critical position, more independent but more desperate. This critic is not encamped. There is one sort of art to which he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... why anyone’s life, or their pain, matters.This is one problem with Singer’s enterprise. Like Robert Nozick, who starts Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) with a bald statement about the existence and authority of individual rights, Singer premises Animal Liberation Now on the idea that the experiential states of sentient creatures matter in an objective ...”

“... mention, which, judging by the index, puts him on the same level of artistic significance as Robert E. Lee. In 1996, introducing an exhibition at the Royal Academy called Gustave Caillebotte: The Unknown Impressionist, the MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe, along with Marie Berhaut a pioneer of Caillebotte studies in the 1970s (and still his most eloquent ...”

“... he is wholly at home in this world. The three volumes of his biography stand comparison with Robert Caro’s Life of Lyndon Johnson in their ability to show us how power works from the inside. Personal relationships at or near the top matter far more than political posturing. It would probably be wise to remember that in the years ahead.At the same ...”

“... is the journey I decide to take; the legend of Grain, from Hogarth’s drunken boat party, through Robert Hamer’s moody film The Long Memory (1952), to the climate camp protests at Kingsnorth, was history enough for me. Ackroyd provided my starting point: London Stone. This beacon, on the east bank of the Yantlet Creek, is said to mark the point at which the ...”