“... he could have been another Beefheart. Instead, he peeled off into racist millennialism, the Green Room at San Quentin, the TV interviews – in which he looks like a wasted George Best carved out of rotten marzipan. Manson’s career proves, if nothing else, that satire has a strictly enforceable shelf-life. The high-risk conclusion to Watson’s epic ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”

“... and mauve, black and white stars’, and that a semi-tone higher it suggests ‘pale, prairie-green foliage, with patches of blue, silver and reddish orange’. The composition might suggest these things, but surely not the mere mode it uses. But even if this was partly a tease (when Claude Samuel reacted with astonishment to some of his ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... wrong, you’re facing more than just your opponent. In a match against Korchnoi, Spassky wore a green eyeshade and sat at a distance from the table in order to thwart Korchnoi’s mind-bending rays. During the Reykjavik match, the Russians dismantled Spassky’s chair to find out if it had been tampered with by the Americans. In chess mythology, the ...”

“... Invisible ink … Trampolines/aniseed sweets/painted eggs. Pencil sharpenings? Magic Faraway, Robert the something, Robert the Rose Horse?’ The bereaved man is convinced by this performance, even marginally consoled: ‘Thank you Crow.’ ‘All part of the service.’ ‘Really. Thank you, Crow.’ ‘You’re ...”

“... was parked described it. What I remember is seeing flashing lights of all colours: red, blue, green and a horrendous noise that actually went right down into your body. But there was like a vacuum after that, there was silence and then all of a sudden there was this swishing sound and everything just went berserk … and then we saw it in its full ...”

“... as, for example, in his demonstration in the House of Commons after the assassination of the Rev. Robert Bradford and his subsequent call for a campaign of passive disobedience to force the British out. Of necessity, the leap of faith is informed or sustained by an idea of martyrdom. Paisley comments that Christ makes frequent references to his death as ...”

“... Security Council responsible for covert operations, had given the CIA station in Léopoldville the green light and wired Devlin $100,000 to finish the job.Kennedy’s​ arrival in the White House signalled a shift in American foreign policy. As a senator he had been critical of France’s undeclared war in Algeria. Now he shocked the Washington establishment ...”

“... these beginnings, an extraordinary financial and quasi-political realm was built. Its architect, Robert Hart, was just 28 when he became Inspector-General in 1863. Rapidly winning the confidence of the Chi’ng court, he went on to create the first modern administrative system in China. Its core was a fiscal bureaucracy that assured the late imperial state ...”

“... the bath. My mother’s family, the Peels, descendants, so Mam’s sister Lemira claimed, of Sir Robert Peel, had once been well-to-do, owning mills in Halifax. The youngest of the three sisters, Aunty Myra was the keeper of the family flame, determined that if her present did not amount to much, a sales assistant in White’s Gown Shop in Briggate living in ...”

“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... young man’s name is Chevalier, which was the name of the man friendship with whom helped to ruin Robert Oppenheimer’s career. Chevalier was not gay but equally reprehensibly a Communist. 11 May, Long Crichel. Yesterday as I was driving down to Dorset (with no radio) the prime minister had gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to ...”

“... working environment than most Birmingham employers, with good housing, and lots of money and green space for (healthy, non-alcoholic, non-competitive) leisure. They were also qualified enthusiasts for the time-and-motion studies and strict work supervision of American ‘scientific management’; Vinen notes that the neat squares of the Dairy Milk bar ...”

“... in the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations. For hawks, such as the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump’s favourite economic adviser, Peter Navarro, the question is why the effort to enrol China in the world economy was undertaken in the first place, and who benefited from an experiment that has gone so badly wrong.The crude Trumpian ...”