“... be familiar to anyone who has kept up with some lugubrious recent works in popular social science. Robert Reich, President Clinton’s Secretary of Labour, earned the post with his 1991 bestseller The Work of Nations. Reich anatomised the familiar fact of increasing income inequality in the United States – falling real wages at the bottom of the income ...”

“... George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of Bombay; Thomas Olivers (‘The God of Abraham praise’), a cobbler who was converted ...”

“... The Socialists disgraced themselves in 1957, becoming genuine warmongers after promising peace. Robert Lacoste, in charge of Algerian affairs under Guy Mollet, then still Président du Conseil (or Prime Minister, as the post became under de Gaulle), was one of the worst. What caused these political pontiffs to become diehards? I remember interviewing Mollet ...”

“... to think again about her work, since she’s nowadays best remembered as the first wife of Robert Lowell, the one whom he drove, while drunk, into a brick wall. The crash necessitated months of excruciatingly painful surgery (recounted in her story ‘The Interior Castle’) and caused – as one male friend helpfully computed – a ‘25 per cent ...”

“... great things? Augustine’s rhetorical question, posed near the end of The City of God, launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection. The martyrs who so publicly and bloodily died for their faith are ...”

“... he staged his paintings. ‘We were surprised to learn that his suicide was so ritualistic,’ Robert Motherwell said. For me, and I imagine for many others then as now, Rothko just was his paintings – paintings that seemed, when we stood before them spellbound, to be our shifting moods themselves. It is with some trepidation that one opens a new ...”

“... peer, Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the second Earl of Lytton; her late father was the poet and statesman Robert Bulwer-Lytton, who had been viceroy of India at the time of the Great Famine of 1876. This was her first stay in prison, and she had been looking forward to seeing how badly women were treated there: instead she was placed in the hospital wing, where she ...”

“... children, dark, hoarded property. The golden stone of its modest neoclassical façade, designed by Robert Edis in 1883, blends into the street front overlooking Green Park. If you had to guess what lay inside you might hazard a hedge fund, or a tax avoidance consultancy, or empty space, left to fatten. Experimental art and its practitioners, surely, left ...”

“... When​  Libra came out in 1988, the American writer Robert Towers said that it had made Don DeLillo the ‘chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction’. ‘Paranoid school’ doesn’t get you very far – Pynchon and Mailer, both broad-brush comparisons, were the other faculty members Towers had in mind – but there’s mileage in the notion of DeLillo as a shaman ...”

“... recapture some of their former splendour? Such thoughts were very much in my mind while reading Robert Garland’s retelling of Athens’s tribulations during those two fraught years of Persian invasion. It is a story that has been told countless times, but never before has the narrative concentrated primarily on the Athenians’ wholesale evacuation of ...”

“... who was strongly committed to the social reformist tradition of Louis Blanc and Proudhon, and Robert Prigent, a progressive Catholic who had been a member of the Resistance and served as minister of public health and population in the early years of the Fourth Republic. In some areas the grand technocratic schemes fell well short of their initial ...”

“... site. Performers included Miley Cyrus and Jay-Z. A few wrinkly legends, including the Zombies and Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin famously turned down the offer to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But ...”

“... to come out, albeit with diminishing frequency, until 1969. William Burroughs, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and Barbara Guest all appeared in its pages. Producing the Floating Bear was an ‘endless rhythm of editing, typing, proofing, printing, collating, stapling, labelling and mailing’, but di Prima understood the importance of controlling ...”

“... of Factory Records, took her on. ‘She was travelling around just on her own with a guy called Robert. They had no money, no food, and she seemed a free spirit, looked a bit desperate. So that immediately attracted me.’ Wise despatched the guy called Robert back to London and found Nico a place to stay. She needed ...”

“... decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ reminds one, is something else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well ...”