“... that only a technology in its infancy can engender. She wonders how governments – or modern-day privateers – might use broadcasts to sway a foreign nation; she asks whether the slide to war might have been avoided had the 1914 Sarajevo assassination taken place in the wireless era and the public heard it discussed by experts; she discusses how a ...”

“... and three children. He was also beginning a relationship with a young, dark-haired woman named Robin Benedict who worked as a prostitute in a bar called Good Time Charlie’s which is in the Combat Zone, Boston’s red-light district. Benedict disappeared in 1983 and today her family mourns the loss of a daughter they never suspected was a ...”

“... will improve his chances of re-election, or has taken on board the neoliberal orthodoxies of the day, or simply spent too much time at the Friedmanite University of Chicago, he is not the progressive many imagine him to be. He got what he got because he wanted it or because he didn’t want something else badly enough. Each of these arguments has something ...”

“... unlawfully acquired. Piers Plowman also contains references to that ‘deeply obscure figure’, Robin Hood, a hero of much legend but little substance. Spraggs notes that Robin Hood has been portrayed by Eric Hobsbawm in Bandits as the archetype of the ‘social bandit’ who championed his people against oppression and ...”

“... us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem surprising that The Shakespearean Forest is not a longer book, but Barton became almost blind as a result of macular degeneration and was forced ...”

“... feminist figureheads of the stature of Barbara Ehrenreich, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan have given it their impeccably feminist imprimatur. As North American feminist figureheads of great stature, Barbara Ehrenreich, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan are all closely associated with New ...”

“... of both the BBC and ITV to double the ordinary length of their evening news broadcasts on the day of his death could be put down to the social democratish inclinations of the programmers, but the speed with which the coverage had to be assembled suggests that it was more instinctive. Furthermore, the reaction of the press wasn’t very different. All the ...”

“... about St Martin who divided his with a poor man: ‘from which we may conclude that it was a cold day for such was the saint’s charity that had it been a warm one he would doubtless have given the poor man his whole cloak.’ Cervantes was poor for a purely literary reason: he could not write verse. This precluded him from any success in the theatre even if ...”

“... Wilson speaks of Jesus in the same breath and tone as he speaks of the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood, he is making a serious point about the traditional techniques of rhetoric as used by St Luke, who, in this instance, drops historical names such as Caesar, Herod and Quirinius into his narrative to make his main character sound more authentic; and ...”

“... biographies to appear in the same season, both by authors who have personally surveyed his route. Robin Lane Fox has covered the whole itinerary, in this surpassing the redoubtable Sir Aurel Stein, who had to wait till he was in his eighties for permission to enter Afghanistan, and, setting out undaunted, died amid the rigours of the promised land. Professor ...”

“... hear you in our world, you not of our world, though we can peer at (though not into) flies, gnats, robin, twitter of what dark consolation – though it could be light, this insistence this morning unmonitored by praise, amazement, nothing to touch where the blinding white thins as the flash moves off what had been just the wide-flung yellow poppy, the ...”

“... Robert Appleyard, a ‘slight wandering lad from the ash-coloured coalfields’ who sets out one day in 1946 on a walk through ‘Northern England, the greenest land there ever was, so pungent and lush it could make a young man dizzy’. On his travels he encounters an eccentric bohemian called Dulcie Piper who lives in a ramshackle house above ...”

“... as a boy. Like Bergman, he gives you the days that are all night, and the nights that are all day; the interleaving of land and water, and city and country; the half-life of religion; the grim pasts and only slightly less grim presents; the unending monochrome winter and the brief summers that are all leaves and insects and blue and green sparkle. His ...”

“... Robin Robertson​ is something of a specialist in pain. He usually describes what painful events look like from the outside rather than how they feel from within. It’s often as though sufferers are so entranced by the appearance of what’s happening to them that they can’t actually see how bad it is. There is a fine slight poem from Slow Air (2002) called ‘Break’ in which a woman is washing glasses in the sink and hears a dull click, like a tongue, under the soap suds ...”

“... Jock Stewart, I’m a canny gun man’ (from the traditional ‘I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day’). Joan Baez’s contralto can, if you squint your ears, pass as a farm-boy tenor; Cait O’Riordan’s chalky delivery might be that of a rich ponce.Their trip is a narrative device that lets the novel get trippy. It’s now a critical text analysing ...”