“... court infamy with his scabrous biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon), the theatre critic Robert Brustein, and others – that helped crack open the shell that released Alex Portnoy into the urban wild. The glum littérateur acquired the gleam of an asylum escapee. Pranked at a breakfast shop by Roth, who mimicked the voice of Goldman’s mother ...”

“... too. He found that he shared his interest in dirty books with ‘the sensitive and worldly-wise’ Robert Conquest and together they went on expeditions, trawling the specialist shops for their respective bag in a partnership that seems both carefree and innocent. Unusual, too, as I had always thought that porn, looking for it and looking at it, was something ...”

“... in hard times that they agreed. These women were later to seek legal relief, and it was Judge Robert Bork as Federal appellate judge who in 1984 ‘ruled in favour of the company’. It may be that American Cyanamid had expected all its female employees would go away rather than undergo sterilisation, and the protection policy (which offered no ...”

“... was that the writer was an elderly man whose name carried with it an uncertain stigma. In 1983 Robert Fisk published In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45 and this seemed to settle the argument about what Stuart had been doing in Germany. Fisk’s account of the episode was based on transcripts of Stuart’s broadcasts in the ...”

“... be put on them. Yet they remain conventional, and surprisingly unaffected by contrary indications. Robert Brenner has shown, pretty conclusively, how little the onset of the Slump in America can be explained by wage repression, or the end of the postwar boom by wage explosion. He has also proposed a genuine theoretical explanation, of the kind Kondratiev was ...”

“... announced on TV: ‘I’m not saying this, but many people are saying the judges are biased’). Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, was found to have been lobbied by a property developer whom he then helped to avoid millions in tax (the developer followed up with a donation to the Conservative Party), but faced no punishment. Priti Patel, the home ...”

“... and Kerr-Bell suggest, however, that the TMO became more intermeshed with the council under Robert Black, who was chief executive at the time of the refurbishment. ‘He instilled a culture where you couldn’t complain,’ I was told. I contacted Black, trying to get him to respond to this allegation, but he preferred not to. The Grenfell Action ...”

“... 1960s in the Pentagon, one of the cerebral ‘whizz kids’ on the staff of the defence secretary Robert McNamara. McNamara was a wonk, confident that no mystery could withstand statistical analysis, and Enthoven was the chief wonk’s wonk, crunching numbers to judge whether the new weapons the generals wanted were worth it. In 1973, Enthoven reinvented ...”

“... to allow full expression of the old pleasures. ‘Retribution,’ the one-time Solicitor General Robert Bork argued before the Supreme Court, ‘is itself an important, perhaps a vital, social function.’ But retribution must be ‘stripped of its vindictiveness’. What sort of retribution, I wonder, is not intended to cause anguish or hurt? What ...”

“... external to the Community and its successor. From the Schuman Plan to the victories in the ECJ of Robert Lecourt, integration was preceded and accompanied by the attentions, and often the initiatives, of the US. So too when Giscard founded the European Council, the impulse came from the breakdown of Bretton Woods and the diminution of American interest in the ...”

“... centre. Through Hunt, Keats met Shelley, Godwin, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Lamb, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and many others who would challenge and comfort him, patronise and defend him, feud over and around him, get drunk and silly with him, delight and disgust him, and otherwise matter to him during this period of explosive poetic growth in what were ...”

“... sexual pleasure. Michael Hastings’s novel The Frauds (1960) features a gay 14-year-old, while Robert Hutton’s 1958 autobiography, Of Those Alone, gives a straightforward picture of his teenage longings, hanging round in stations and at last being seduced at the age of sixteen by a man of 35: ‘I knew that this was what, both physically and mentally, I ...”

“... published in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the ...”

“... is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the ...”

“... with good grace but it’s hard when it was brought about by a campaign eloquently described by Robert Harris as ‘the most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime’: words which, incidentally, were written before the announcement of the murder of Jo Cox, the defacement of London’s Polish Social and Cultural Association, and the ...”