“... Recent years have seen a spate of biographies of China’s 20th-century leaders, including Robert L. Suettinger’s Life of Hu Yaobang and Chen Jian’s of Zhou Enlai, both published in 2024.* We can now add Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi Zhongxun. Such biographies necessarily intervene in several irresolvable contests. Were these men principled ...”

“... of Gaddafi’s career shown on BBC World Service Television on the night of 20 October, John Simpson stopped well short of endorsing either charge, noting of the Berlin bombing that ‘it may or may not have been Colonel Gaddafi’s work,’ an honest formula that acknowledged the room for doubt. Of Lockerbie he remarked cautiously that Libya ...”

“... course, is closely correlated with the income of the accused. Not everyone is entitled to the O.J. Simpson dream team, but even the poor must have a jury that at least considers mitigation against aggravation. And here, too, the system fails. The trial attorneys in some of McFeely’s cases were less than effective, but not by comparison with the general run ...”

“... is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the ...”

“... thinking a thatched roof was the height of exotic. Everything changed for me with the discovery of Robert Burns: those torn-up fields out there were his fields, those bulldozed farms as old as his words, both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual ...”

“... four countries, and paid their local federations $300,000 for the privilege. The CEO of Adidas, Robert Louis-Dreyfus, loaned the DFB €6.7 million, which was used to help secure the four Asian votes; this only came to light when he was later repaid via a Fifa account.As ever, Vladimir Putin was watching. In 2010, in advance of the bids for the 2018 and ...”

“... travelled. Look it up.’ Norman looked it up in the Dictionary of Quotations to find that it was Robert Frost. ‘I know the word for you,’ said the Queen. ‘Maam?’ ‘You run errands, you change my library books, you look up awkward words in the dictionary and find me quotations. Do you know what you are?’ ‘I used to be a ...”