“... American ideology. In ‘The Purposes of American Power’ (Foreign Affairs, Winter 1980-81), Robert Tucker claims to be steering a new course between proponents of ‘resurgent America’ and ‘isolationism’. Yet for the Persian Gulf and Central America he proposes a policy of frank interventionism, since, he ...”

“... sexual offences by GIs in the UK, including 126 rapes, were documented, though the sociologist J. Robert Lilly has argued that only 5 per cent of rapes were reported: he estimates that between 1942 and 1945 US military personnel raped almost 2500 women in Britain, more than 3600 in France and more than 11,000 in Germany. Anti-Black racism meant that African ...”

“... Introducing​ his text of Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare, Frank Kermode calls it ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, and adds, as if conceding to the long academic stress on its highly ‘problematic’ character: ‘how Shakespeare came to write it is, of course, a mystery on which it is useless to speculate ...”

“... On the main stage Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who advises the US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, said it was ‘highly likely’ that the Covid vaccine was ‘a significant factor in the cancers in the royal family’. During a live recording of a podcast for the Telegraph, Allison Pearson accused the police of having ‘tampered’ with ...”

“... spears at the British. Individual British deaths were taken very seriously. After Lieutenant Robert Grenfell was hacked to death during the cavalry charge at Omdurman, his brother’s angry account of it spurred the men inspecting the wasted battlefield to ‘polish off the wounded and dangerous Dervishes with their bayonets in a very determined ...”

“... of Anglo-American liberal imperialism occasionally berate his prejudices. Historians such as Frank Prochaska and Hugh Tulloch have portrayed him as a believer in the Anglo-Saxon racial mission.In truth, no one has pushed these partisan readings very far, because Bryce was too fastidious a writer to scatter wild generalisations through his writing. On the ...”

“... well, since the tale is in substance almost unbearably violent and cruel, a manifestation of what Robert Frost calls ‘design of darkness to appal’. The central figure, Yoshihide, is a painter, a wholly disagreeable man who loves only two things: his art and his daughter. The daughter is a Lady-in-Waiting to the Grand Lord of Horikawa, whose particular ...”

“... debate in academic and cultural life in America. Her subjects range from the attempts to suppress Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs (the famous print of Mapplethorpe with a whip inserted into his anus is reproduced in evidence) to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to the way the exposé of Paul de Man’s early anti-Semitic writings has been used to ...”

“... and post-religious recovery, ranging from The Nemesis of Faith (1849) by his disciple and too frank biographer J.A. Froude to Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). The German setting and European (and occasionally Asian and African) frame of reference seem to make this a cosmopolitan rather than an English or Scottish ...”

“... even more suburban San Fernando Valley, much was written about Richard Meier’s architecture and Robert Irwin’s gardens. Remarkably little was written about the parking garage, though it’s the first structure you encounter on arriving at the Getty. (Theoretically, you could take a bus there, but this is, after all, a museum in LA up on a bluff above the ...”

“... argument on a military principle known as ‘unlawful command influence’, the defence attorney, Frank Spinner, asked the judge to dismiss the case. With no jurors present, Spinner introduced a witness who testified that he had overheard a conversation on the base which suggested unlawful command influence on the part of Fort Carson’s commanding ...”

“... of many waters’. In his remarkable new translation of the Pentateuch, a monument of scholarship, Robert Alter eschews ‘face’ to describe the surface of the world at the start of Genesis, and I miss the cosmic implications, but his first two verses amply compensate with their own originality: ‘When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth ...”

“... Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us ...”

“... left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger seat, is asleep. Joe Pesci, in the back seat, is nodding off. A thumping noise is heard, and Liotta says, ‘Jimmy.’ De Niro wakes up. Liotta continues: ‘Did I hear somethin’?’ Cut to a side view of the rear of the ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”