“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to prevent, or make good, the consequences of bad loans and bankruptcy. As for the workforce, Robert Fitzgerald, in his account of the Rowntrees, points out that since ‘business and wealth were viewed by the Quakers as a God-given trust, labour could not be treated as a mere commodity’.In fact, some Quaker industrialists treated workers very ...”

“... sent copies of poems they had been working on to famous poets, including the poet laureate Robert Southey. We don’t have Charlotte’s letter to Southey, or know which poems she sent, but parts of her letter are quoted in his and show her extravagant style of praise – she begs him to ‘stoop from his throne of light and glory’ – which he ...”

“... and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable allusion. While he was writing ...”

“... a uniformed soldier marched up and down and we looked beyond the tombs and the urban parks to see Robert Lowell’s Washington Monument, ‘stark as a compass needle in the ...”

“... it; the industrial revolution was a far more gradual affair than the name implies. The historian Robert Brenner argues that England had a head start over its Continental peers in the shift from feudalism to capitalism because, come the Black Death, the elites on either side of the Channel shafted the surviving peasants in different ways. In mainland ...”

“... prose that – especially in generations formed before the Civil War: for Powell, conspicuously Robert Burton – was modally baroque left its mark too.Out of this frequentation with forms of writing prior to Augustan normalisation, and a much wider range of wartime and postwar reading, not just in English literature, Powell developed a style as unlike his ...”

“... always been a right keen smoker has Frank. Now he’s paying the price.’ Midgley fell asleep. ‘Robert Donat had bronchitis,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘Mr Midgley.’ The doctor shook his shoulder. ‘Denis,’ said Aunt Kitty. ‘It’s doctor.’ He was a pale young Pakistani, and for a moment Midgley thought he had fallen asleep in class and was being woken ...”

“... performs the same function. On sale are various leaflets: reprints of articles by John Pilger and Robert Fisk, discourses on the evils of Christianity and what to do if arrested by the security services. A well-thumbed copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is going for a tenner. Further down the street, past the steel crowd-control barriers which line ...”

“... of the puzzlement felt on this score in London,’ records the leading scholar of the subject, Robert Holland: ‘It remains … a notable fact that it was the British who, in the first instance, had to screw the Turks up to a pitch of excitement about Cyprus, not the other way round.’1 When the requisite excitement eventually came, London did not flinch ...”