“... right-wing publications and played a critical role in the purges of China scholars and Foreign Service officers during the McCarthy period. This episode tore apart the field of East Asian studies in America; people wouldn’t speak to each other for years. But China was now ‘Red China’, and the government needed experts. In the late 1950s the Ford ...”

“... the Supreme Court has been gathering momentum for almost twenty years: the nomination battles over Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 were harbingers. But times have changed since these bitter contests. Bork was a cutting-edge neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking down laws protecting workers and ...”

“... for the youthful Ackroyd, was ‘a one-horse town’. He was glad to be out of it, in the service of international Modernism. Autobiography could be adjusted later, shifting with the climate of the times. In my copy of Ouch, the poet has made a holograph correction: ‘reaming of things to come’ is revised to ‘dreaming’. Ackroyd’s second book ...”

“... media, you would be my concubines.’ One of the weirdest lines of the 2024 US election came from Robert J. O’Neill, a pro-Trump former Navy SEAL who claims to have been one of those who shot Osama bin Laden. Respondents to O’Neill’s post on X, which was directed at a gaggle of young, male campaigners, wondered whether it was a lexical flub. But ...”

“... drinking club for young Southern gentlemen. He attributed his own widened social sympathies to his service as a private in the US medical corps in France in 1917-18, though in later life the manners and attachments of his class were what struck younger observers. It had been clear from his schooldays that he wanted to write. What now seems striking is the ...”

“... of hours to astrology. He once cast Philip Larkin’s horoscope, probably an underappreciated service. All of which implies cultural history painted with the broadest of brushes: the villain of the piece is the Renaissance, that catastrophe of individualism, which gave birth at once to the hubris of the scientific mind and the desiccated spirituality of ...”

“... with a grudge, melting into the crowd. There have been plenty of incidents – George Wallace or Robert Kennedy – like that. Taiwan is in its way a highly politicised society, in which partisan passions run deeper than in older and more jaded democracies, and the immediate effect of the magical missile has been to polarise public opinion more than ever ...”

“... prime ministership and the Shia office of house speaker, down to the lowliest post in the civil service. Now, almost sixty years later, Salibi, the author of the standard history of Lebanon – A House of Many Mansions – was watching the Syrian army pack up and go home across the French-created border. There was no 21-gun salute. ‘If they had withdrawn ...”

“... a large Mongol population remained in Russia, intermarrying with the Slavs and entering into the service of the Russian state. Many common words in Russian are taken from the Tatar, ‘and there is also reason to suppose that the shamanistic cults of the Mongol tribes were incorporated into the Russian peasant faith.’ Figes goes so far as to suggest that ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

“... capitalisation required. It was a serious thing, trying to be a writer. My ex-boyfriend, Robert, had just won a national book contest. When I first saw David, he was kneeling next to Robert’s chair, looking up at him. I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed. But David noticed me in a different ...”

“... published in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the ...”

“... him the first issue of the Black Mountain Review and introduced him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But when you saw Andy naked, he looked ...”

“... become painful: ‘As for the New Testament, narrative power of the highest quality (in the service of the great message it conveys) is displayed time after time.’ Phelps’s studied blandness mostly muffles – here, suffocatingly – any grinding of axes. Nonetheless, a certain amount of parti is being pris. He admits in the Preface that many ...”

“... for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and no ...”