“... in the election. The SPD dropped to 16 per cent of the vote, a 138-year low. Tainted by its leader Robert Habeck’s determination to co-operate with Merz’s next government, the Greens – until recently the vanguard party of what Nancy Fraser calls ‘progressive neoliberalism’ – were punished severely, and reduced to such embarrassing moves as having ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... AN ENVELOPE (WHITE) CONTAINING ANOTHER ENVELOPE (RED) CONTAINING A LIST OF 9 PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE (UNNAMED) WITH INSTRUCTIONS (ENGLISH)] Funded by your tax dollars vile fire pushes by day and night to break out! I’d never send you vile fire itself I want you to know! Homosexuals always mumble but their saddles are silver! Don’t open ...”

“... into focus out of the historical blur) often with great vividness. The three men, Thomas Evans, Robert Wedderburn and George Cannon, were affiliated with ultra-radicalism and Spence before the letter’s death in 1814 – though Cannon, almost a generation younger than the others, was a late arrival. The first part of Dr McCalman’s study looks at the ...”

“... that Barrett’s poems were unnecessarily ‘obscure’ – a common complaint about the work of Robert Browning which she also repeatedly echoed. Often EBB penitently acknowledges the fault – ‘my obscure devil’ – just as she often insists on the inevitable cloudiness of those who strive after the sublime. Aeschylus, after all, was ‘the sublimest ...”

“... and I was reprimanded by both of them for having used the word “spit”.’ In his introduction, Robert Giroux incorrectly identifies the offending story as ‘The Farmer’s Children’ – an implacable masterpiece which he stigmatises as ‘more conventional and sentimental than anything else she wrote’. ‘The Farmer’s Children’ is devoid of ...”

“... the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by ...”

“... by this bench marked the completion of the final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and ...”

“... shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis Stevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment and dive into the ocean looking for ...”

“... a social one: she was proud of owning Anatole France but was not in the least gratified when Count Robert de Montesquiou, one of the originals of Charlus and a devastating snob himself, made up to her. All such matters had to be modified until they could become part of Proust’s world; and Painter shows how the complication and contingency of real lives were ...”

“... both Philby and Burgess, was recalled to Moscow and shot. During the three-year period covered by Robert Conquest in Inside Stalin’s Secret Police the NKVD leadership was twice liquidated. Nikolai Yezhov, who succeeded G.G. Yagoda as head of the NKVD in September 1936, purged most of Yagoda’s men in the spring of 1937 (though Yagoda himself was not shot ...”

“... on the martyr’s role: ‘I have a death-thing, I know ...’ he told his official biographer Robert Shelton in one of his more revealing interviews, as if confiding to an apostle. The concerts themselves often turned into furious confrontations between performers and audience, with disgruntled folk-music lovers heckling throughout the rock ‘n’ roll ...”

“... period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant ...”

“... in the arts. The outcomes of these are mixed. At best, these artists and writers could say, as Robert Rauschenberg did of his alliance with Jasper Johns, that ‘we gave each other permission.’ And ‘there was that business of triggering energies,’ Johns said. At worst, there is André Malraux saying to Clara Malraux: ‘Better to be my wife than a ...”

“... Marooned in the ‘painful but glorious days’ of his past, he rather resembles the characters of Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: all of these concern South Vietnamese immigrants who have settled, for the most part happily, in Louisiana, yet who hark constantly back to their ...”