The Righteous Community

Jackson Lears: Legacies of the War on Terror, 24 July 2025

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life 
by Richard Beck.
Verso, 556 pp., £30, March, 978 1 83674 072 8
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“... 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 ...”

Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941

Colm Tóibín, 22 January 2026

“... 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 ...”

In the Hyacinth Garden

Richard Poirier: ‘But oh – Vivienne!’, 3 April 2003

Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot 
by Carole Seymour-Jones.
Constable, 702 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 84119 636 3
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“... James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable public acclaim, published A Boy’s Will, his first book of poems. According to Valerie Eliot, it was Pound ...”

Reservations of the Marvellous

T.J. Clark, 22 June 2000

The Arcades Project 
by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland.
Harvard, 1073 pp., £24.95, December 1999, 9780674043268
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“... 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 ...”

The Last Witness

Colm Tóibín: The career of James Baldwin, 20 September 2001

“... interviews and going on television. In May 1963 came the much publicised and stormy meeting with Robert Kennedy, in which Baldwin and a number of activists tried to explain the extent of black alienation, and Baldwin’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine the following day. He was not part of the organised leadership of the Civil Rights Movement and ...”

Daughter of the West

Tariq Ali: The Bhuttos, 13 December 2007

“... 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 ...”

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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“... 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 ...”

‘Rip their skin off’

Alexander Clapp: Montenegro’s Pivot, 25 April 2024

“... 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 ...”

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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“... 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 ...”

Sick of the Subject

Leo Robson: Ralph Ellison’s Interventions, 22 October 2026

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Revised and Updated 
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan.
Modern Library, 816 pp., $30, February 2024, 978 0 593 73006 5
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The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison 
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner.
Modern Library, 1072 pp., $30, March 2024, 978 0 593 73007 2
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“... been a reaction to radical tendencies that would emerge in new forms in the 1960s. Reflecting on Robert Lowell’s open letter to Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam, Ellison said that he was ‘amazed, having gone through the political madness that marked the intellectual experience of the “Thirties”, to see many of our leading American intellectuals, poets ...”

The End of British Farming

Andrew O’Hagan: British farming, 22 March 2001

“... 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 ...”

‘J’accuse’: Dreyfus in Our Times

Jacqueline Rose: A Lecture, 10 June 2010

“... the country; and finally, the deepest suspicion of intellectual life, a hatred, in the words of Robert Gauthier, key chronicler of the affair, ‘of free inquiry masquerading as a call to action’ (to my mind, this is just about the best definition of anti-intellectualism you could hope to get). ‘To tolerate that an external force of ...”

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

“... this year’). He got an A in Metalwork, but the teacher couldn’t think of his name and wrote ‘Robert’ while telling him to keep up the good work. His form teacher, Mr Norman, said that ‘Ronnie’s attitude and standard of work is slipping. I hope that he takes note of what has been said to him recently. He is always pleasant and happy.’ Ronnie ...”

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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“... of the common good and the unselfishness and ability to administer it’. An Eton teacher, ‘Red Robert’ Birley, had encouraged him to read the Marxist economist Harold Laski and to visit the school’s ‘mission’ in London’s East End, which David had found ‘very useful as it gives me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with members of the middle ...”

Trains in Space

James Meek: The Great Train Robbery, 5 May 2016

The Railways: Nation, Network and People 
by Simon Bradley.
Profile, 645 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 1 84668 209 4
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“... 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 ...”