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“... spectators who sometimes had to skip out of the way of the fighting. As the publisher and writer Robert Chambers later recorded, they ‘saw the discomfited troops burst wildly from the thunder-cloud … and rush, in far-spread disorder, over the spacious face of the hill’.Some of those spectators – perhaps most of them – hadn’t come to see history ...”

“... in the army, Jasper Johns, aged 23, moved back to New York City. There, a few months later, he met Robert Rauschenberg. Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings ...”

“... his parents scrimped and saved to send him to Aberdeen’s most prestigious private school, Robert Gordon’s College, where he eventually won a scholarship. Gove owed his escape from such modest beginnings to his education and, it seems, he has never forgotten it. ‘All schools,’ he believed, even as education secretary decades later, according to ...”

“... Louise encouraged him. She helped with the visa and said that he could come to live with her, Robert and their children. Pierre sold his maternal inheritance – a garage in Clamart – and with the money booked his passage from France to the US. But Louise balked, and asked their father to stop Pierre leaving, without letting Pierre know she had ...”

“... after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to ...”

“... against Parliament, that the recusant Lord Monteagle handed over to James’s secretary of state, Robert Cecil, just before the plot was exposed. But Shakespeare had used a similar plot device in Twelfth Night (the comedy that is remembered in the Fool’s song at the end of Act III, scene ii), and even Shapiro admits that the writing of the episode in King ...”

“... for home use. ‘Some day this war is going to end,’ the gung-ho Colonel Kilgore played by Robert Duvall says in the film. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) later repeats the line, thinking how happy the young men travelling upriver with him will be when that day comes, and they can go home. ‘The trouble is,’ Willard adds, ‘I had been back ...”

“... family, so Clancy was doubly betrayed while hardly acknowledged – he grew up with Jimmy Cagney, Robert Mitchum and Clark Gable as his ‘movie fathers’. From an early age he developed what he calls a ‘star astigmatism’. R.D. Laing later told him he had ‘the makings of a first-class schizophrenic’. His problem, he admits, was ‘slipp[ing] onto the ...”

“... ears, bit her, punched her in the face, and almost broke her legs by kicking her furiously.’Even Robert Lowell got carried away. In his long sonnet sequence ‘History’, he imagines one of Mary’s famous flights by night across Scotland on horseback as happening by car:We roared off hell-wheel and scattered the soft mob;happily only one man splashed the ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend ...”

“... were in there all the time and this really hurts us, too.’ Kristina was still thinking about Robert L. ‘I can’t believe I offered that man a drink. I’m an idiot.’ He looked pained. I said: ‘That’s actually what they told us to do earlier. Offer something to drink. It’s OK.’ It occurred to me that the question ‘Can I bring you something ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring ...”

“... a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off by a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed ...”

“... at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will ...”