“... from The Year’s Afternoon, presents an altogether more benevolent vision of life at sea, as Robert Louis Stevenson launches Dunn on the ‘Seven Seas’ pollutionless stretches that wander for miles and miles’. The ending is unblushingly nostalgic: ‘Ah, Stevenson, your pages pleased me as a boy./Now that I’m not, I weep over them, and with ...”

“... always dresses up in her best clothes. Their sex life, such as it ever was, is faltering badly. Robert, their 18-year-old son (Charlie is in his late forties, Maureen ten years younger), is unemployed, and Charlie disapproves of him, calls him a ‘layabout’. It breaks his mother’s heart when he leaves home and moves into a squat. Charlie has a younger ...”

“... of faith. All this is a far cry from the myth of unbroken hostility between Russia and Islam. Robert Crews makes many of these points in his new book on Russia’s management of its Muslim subjects from the reign of Catherine the Great until 1917. Unfortunately, to make up for the sins of past generations, Crews overcompensates. ‘The tsarist ...”

“... to them. The author of the entry on animals in the Oxford Companion to the Mind, the ethologist Robert Hinde, writes that ‘chimpanzees have a conception of the self and can dissemble and deceive others,’ and that there is strong evidence that ‘dogs have pleasant and unpleasant dreams.’ Someone must have forgotten to warn Hinde that such discourse is ...”

“... the main author of Trump’s 2018 National Defence Strategy; the former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who describes China as part of an ‘axis of anti-American autocracies’; and Robert Lighthizer, the leading Republican trade warrior who speaks of China as a totalitarian state – will return to ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... How Cary Grant would not pick up the tab, Omar Sharif sent roses in a cab, Those little lumps in Robert Redford’s cheek. Where Don’s concerned the first glance is enough: For certain he takes soon what we might late. The rest of us may talk seductive guff Unendingly and not come up to snuff, Whereat we most obscenely fulminate. We say of her that she ...”

“... Azores – Murph had the radio on.Sports mostly, we’d talk sports, but the news too. Murph hated Robert Kennedy.Murph said he’d win because he made ‘all the broads cream in their jeans.’Dad hated Kennedy too, all of ’em, Poppa Joe to his toothy, roguering whelps.But Dad loved Murph, and Murph loved Dad. That’s why he let Murph drive me.One day ...”

“... When Robert Graves left Charterhouse School in 1914, the headmaster wrote in his report: ‘Well, goodbye, Graves and remember that your best friend is the wastepaper basket.’ (Charterhouse is the public school that was recently reported to be replacing its tuckshop with a branch of Starbucks, but in fact isn’t ...”

“... though HarperCollins published a book of his lyrics back in November. He was, however, claimed as Robert Browning’s equal in a peculiar article by Giles Foden that appeared in the Guardian in February, in which Foden talked, hilariously, about Eminem’s ‘oeuvre’. There have, more recently, been some letters to the Independent debating the rapper’s ...”

“... of Eleanor’s friendship with Morris but of the continuing corruption of capitalism. After him, Robert Griffiths of the CPB (the ‘G’ got lost some years back) apologised sheepishly for the lack of sisters, busy at the TUC in Brighton. But Griffiths, being Welsh, had a trick up his sleeve in the shape of the Strawberry Thieves, a socialist choir from ...”

“... pair of hands. Nichols begins with a story that pretty much says it all. On 7 February 2001, Robert Pickett fired several rounds from a handgun through the fence surrounding the White House.Unaware of whether or not a terrorist incident was playing out, secret service agents rushed to the sides of the vice-president and president. They found Cheney ...”

“... Plotz investigates the Repository for Germinal Choice that was founded in California in 1980 by Robert Graham, an ‘eccentric millionaire’, and closed in 1999. The only prize-winner to fess up to having donated was William Shockley, who invented the transistor. He also thought people with an IQ of less than 100 should be paid to undergo voluntary ...”

“... Carp (Prion, £8.99), but he is acknowledged on the title page, and his potted biography is in Robert Robinson’s introduction. Carp, unlike his author, has no pretensions to modesty: It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography, to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when ...”

“... aid and comfort to the Islamists’ struggle against the global hegemony of the United States. Robert Irwin London I have been reluctant to comment on the recent ‘events’ because the event in question, as history, is incomplete and one can even say that it has not yet fully happened. Obviously there are immediate comments one can make, in particular on ...”