“... the best in the country, and education – including that offered at a nautical school run by Robert Burns’s friend David Sillar – was counted high. There was suddenly a book shop, Templeton’s in the High Street, and newspapers from London, along with the hot political and literary journals of the day. In a flash, Irvine became a town that was part ...”

“... 1978. Humphrey Bogart’s momentum, his Jacobean wit, is transformed by the passage of time into Robert Mitchum’s monumental disdain. Mitchum is breathless, sculptural. He moves with extreme reluctance, as if charging an excess tariff for every step. Sallis understands how it’s done, he’s been to the classes. He’s learnt how to assemble the ...”

“... can’t be true.’ He insists: one night, a woman claimed she saw some elves on the green. The next night, someone backed her up. On the third night, Albertina’s mother made him walk down with her to take a look, but the crowds were so big, they couldn’t get close.Albertina used to run a boxing club with his brother Jimmy. ‘One thing ...”

“... in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.‘The murder of the ice-cream man violates all nature,’ Longley said in an interview, and his poem is ...”

“... could be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost of Evans haunts Pandora’s Box, which covers the time some perhaps premature ...”

“... Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgment. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of ...”

“... year later, she was, it seemed, a walking advertisement for herself, dressed ‘in every shade of green from the palest lichen to the fullest summer foliage – a lizard trimmed with beetles’. Anna, Comtesse de Brémont, in Oscar Wilde and His Mother, published in 1911, remembered ‘her arrayed in draperies after the medieval style, or cerise and black ...”

“... the first. The South Bank Show was also reviewed in the Spectator by Richard Ingrams, as follows:[Robert] Redford was followed onto the show by young Martin Amis, a rather scruffy looking man without a tie. I was baffled as to why his new novel should be given about half an hour of publicity when there are so many other things worthy of attention ... Amis ...”

“... the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through Gogol’s stories with ...”

“... therapies and conspiracy theories about medicine and vaccination. Like his populist counterpart Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, and many MAGA influencers, Georgescu benefited from the pandemic, using people’s fear, uncertainty and ignorance to braid together an anti-establishment and anti-vax message, thus strengthening each strand: the ...”

“... and correspondence with his publisher, François Maspero. As the editors, Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, note, this body of writing – unfinished, restless, often agonised – reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second ...”

“... emerges in these books like a heat map, flaring in patches round the edges at Shepherd’s Bush Green or Clapham Common, where activity concentrates at night around public lavatories, and further out, at Wimbledon Common (‘exactly five miles from the bright lights of Piccadilly’), where in 1963 a reporter from the News of the World, high on ...”

“... but his poems were used during the war in which such witnessings acquired unprecedented authority. Robert Lowell’s remark that it was as if Housman had foreseen the Somme is one of the more complicated signposts in Housman country. His youngest brother, Herbert, was killed in action in 1901, and his nephew Clement Symons in Flanders in 1915. He wrote in 1933 ...”

“... its medieval layout. It’s not hard to notice the absence at the heart of the town, a great green open space once occupied by a massive Benedictine abbey. Little of it is left: the remains of two monumental entrance gates plus a lofty detached bell tower, the latter dwarfing the two parish churches that once respectfully flanked an abbey church as large ...”

“... the entire country. Based on research completed in August 1994 in 41 of the 145 Rwandan communes, Robert Gersony, a UNHCR consultant, estimated that ‘between 25,000 and 40,000 persons’ were killed during the first 100 days of RPF rule. The Gersony report – in fact just briefing notes – was leaked to the press. Under intense pressure from Kigali and ...”