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“... inaugural address carried the stamp of hot ambition even in its salutation: ‘Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you.’ What were the people of the world doing here? It has been conjectured that Trump was greeting a blood-brotherhood of populari ...”

“... prop. It has passed through the levels of Eng Lit from the coal-owner’s estate in Lawrence to David Storey’s Radcliffe and homoerotic fumblings among the guy ropes. There is the same smack of Mosleyite fellow-travelling that Ishiguro exploits in The Remains of the Day. ‘Stand in the snug every Sunday after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about ...”

“... for cases like that of the Manhattan life-insurance saleswoman who sent donations to Oral Roberts, a preacher who raised millions of dollars by proclaiming that God would ‘call him home’ if he did not receive the money. Balmer, who hopes to explain as well as entertain, sometimes plays down the strangeness of his subjects by emphasising the ...”

“... offices. Tulsa even has a Right Wing Restaurant (chicken, I guess), and the fundamentalist Oral Roberts University, with its huge prayer tower, is the city’s main tourist attraction. Dr Tom Coburn, Oklahoma’s Republican candidate for the Senate, may be the most conservative candidate in the country. ‘No one gets to the right of the guy,’ a supporter ...”

“... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...”

“... of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for homosexuality, the counsel for the prosecution, G.D. ‘Khaki’ Roberts (‘fruity-voiced, with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as ...”

“... aptly named Hubert Bland, the incompetent Clennell Wilkinson, the pompous and plagiaristic Ellis Roberts. And there were writers who, like David Garnett, simply couldn’t manage the world of journalistic deadlines. Today, leftish journals face an ever-widening gulf between the concerns of ‘cultural politics’ and the ...”

“... was unedifying.’ In conclusion, Davis quotes the poignant warning of a famous father, Alderman Roberts of Grantham, in 1946: ‘You have only to look around the world today and find that efforts are being made to govern countries without local authorities, and we want to avoid that by all means in this country.’ The collapse of Britain’s particular ...”

“... the one occasion I met Vidal was in a television studio where the wife of the talkshow host David Susskind, attempting to launch a separate career, was presiding over her own prospective talkshow. Taking part in the pilot were Vidal, the movie critic Pauline Kael, the actor Ed Asner (TV’s Lou Grant), and myself. Before the taping, Vidal and I chatted ...”

“... the bulk of these to the North. But in August 1949 the senior US officer in Korea, General Roberts, wrote to a friend: Each [incident] was in our opinion brought on by the presence of a small South Korean salient north of the parallel. Each was characterised by the [South Korean] COs screaming: ‘invasion, reinforce, ammo!’ ... The South Koreans ...”

“... modern art culture – Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Krasner, Hans Hofmann, the sculptor David Smith – which had spent a decade submitting to the master. ‘Aha,’ Gorky is supposed to have said coldly to de Kooning on first being shown the younger artist’s Picasso-saturated work, ‘so you have ideas of your own.’ Picasso’s aren’t good ...”

“... there have been full-length treatments of different kinds by Michael Sherborne (2010) and Adam Roberts (2019), plus David Lodge’s fictionalised rendering of Wells’s life in A Man of Parts (2011), while four fully annotated volumes of his letters came out in 1998. Claire Tomalin is one of the most highly acclaimed ...”

“... a buyer willing to offer $1 billion. The man running it went by the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, an attempt by Ulbricht to imply that the person behind the site had changed over time, since in The Princess Bride the identity of the DPR is handed down from one incumbent to the next. In 2013 Dread Pirate ...”

“... by being called Buttercup and not being a cow. It also has a character called the Dread Pirate Roberts, which is not just deliberately wrong (we all know pirates have names that suggest facial hair or booty) but wrong in being hereditary, like ‘caesar’. We discover that previous Dread Pirate Robertses have included a man originally called Ryan, who ...”

“... more tolerant, on men with pony-tails or long, curly hair. There is no interest, for example, in David Bowie’s floral dress or Boy George’s Body Map kilt or the many other examples of drag or quasi-drag one might think of. Essential modernity, in the form of the neoclassical male silhouette, is here to stay. The modern suit provides us all with ‘a ...”