“... even liberal, white males (Jack Kemp). The logic was simple enough. Starting off with Robert Dole, the quintessential tough-guy white male candidate, the wounded veteran (= ‘war hero’ in current parlance), a man’s man of few words, the Convention would have been a total failure if it had unfolded as a celebration of manly virtues. That would ...”

“... of the sunshine soldier – going to Cadet Corps parades and cotillions while carefully avoiding service at the front and stressing ‘preparedness’ at home. By 1917, with the country’s first Red Scare getting into its stride, young J. Edgar was an enthusiastic snooper, chasing down aliens and subversives as if they were the same thing. (He recommended ...”

“... to earn the right to the luxury of practising his art’. Heaney represents in similar fashion Robert Lowell’s year in prison as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Lowell was ‘earning his poetic rights by service in the unpoetic world of jail’. Elsewhere, Heaney asks: ‘What right has poetry to ...”

“... of blood sacrifice, whereby Ireland might be spiritually resurrected. Pearse’s own cult of Robert Emmet, the doomed leader of the insurrection of 1803, has tended to reinforce this view. Wolfe Tone, the republican leader of the 1798 rebellion, the largest in Irish history, was the most revered of all Irish nationalists, but though Tone’s centenary ...”

“... South, blacks were denied the basic prerogatives of citizenship, including the franchise and jury service. As the story is customarily told, the victory against Jim Crow began with the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated schools were constitutionally impermissible. The grassroots movement for civil ...”

“... of The Land of Mist itself, which revives our old friends Challenger, Roxton and Malone in the service of a new cause. But another chapter, and another, and another, is also what Conan Doyle spun out for the Strand. Geraldine Cummins, the medium whose copyright dispute Conan Doyle was called in to arbitrate, gave the metaphor a different spin a few years ...”

“... count and for this reason is not dispensed by pharmacies but only directly by the mental health service. In the early days the medicine arrived through the post along with a monthly dose of Diazepam from the hospital. I had been warned that Diazepam was highly addictive and that I shouldn’t take it. But now I was sent a regular supply every four weeks. I ...”

“... keyboard. He keeps his hand in by studying piano with Mr Natural, or the individual on whom Robert Crumb’s comic-strip character Mr Natural is based. Mr Natural teaches out of a storefront in the Haight in San Francisco, where the Maestro and I are long-time neighbours. The Maestro regularly drives between San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, where ...”

“... and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate family, seems to ...”

“... effort, a novel about a historian of the Nazis who is also a Nazi sympathiser – in 1995, Robert Kelly, in a somewhat grudging review in the New York Times, spoke honestly about the prompt reviewer’s quandary: ‘It is not much comfort to lay aside this infuriating and offensive masterpiece and call it a satire, as if a genre could heal the wounds ...”

“... Meldungen aus dem Reich, the regular confidential reports on civilian morale made by SS Security Service and local and regional government officials, together with diaries and correspondence, especially field-post letters to and from soldiers at the front, to chart the diverse and changing attitudes to victory and defeat. The most notable of these ...”

“... been murdered in the camps found it hard to speak about their loss. In Germany, the 1964 trial of Robert Mulka – former adjutant to Commandant Rudolf Höss – and 21 others for crimes committed at Auschwitz enabled a new generation to confront the past, but in Britain and the United States it was only some years later that it became possible to broach the ...”

“... interest in the hidden dealings of the rich and powerful. Tiny Rowland, Mohammed Al Fayed and Robert Maxwell have all received the treatment and been carefully scrutinised. His account of Maxwell’s affairs delved into the murky depths, but he also kept a wary eye on the dubious ethics of the business world around the man, and produced an interestingly ...”

“... and non-transparent. There was considerable overlap of responsibilities, and the existing civil service was marginalised. Rural administration and military support depended on the uncertain loyalties of regional commanders, who in turn relied on half-amateur personal militias. Many people had associated with the Taliban during their five years as the Kabul ...”

“... of wealth acquisition that thrives on inequality, but leaves no one better off. Twenty years ago Robert Frank wrote a brilliant book about the quest for status, Choosing the Right Pond, and Offer’s contribution brings Frank’s analysis up to date. We run faster and faster, for longer and longer, just to keep up. And it isn’t only about status. As Fred ...”