“... 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 ...”

“... as the scion of two prominent abolitionist families, at the views of the Beagle’s Tory Captain Robert FitzRoy concerning slavery in Brazil. But whereas Desmond and Moore are content to remark that ‘in his Whig heart Darwin knew wrong from right,’ Browne goes on to point out that however sincerely and vehemently the Darwins and Wedgwoods opposed ...”

“... in these abstract Modernists. One of the many things that is so interesting about him, and that Robert Ferguson illuminates in this first thorough biography, is his redescription of original sin as the best way of talking about ineluctable human limitations. In his own combative, unacademic way he was trying to work out why original sin, even in its secular ...”

“... fields. Most of these responses have developed or refined Said’s framework in some way. Not so Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. Irwin’s central point is that before there was Orientalism, there was Orientalism: the scholarly study of languages and texts pertaining to the Orient. The book operates on two levels. In ...”

“... to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton dared his fellow delegate ...”

“... see that they would work as poetry in the Italian. Others again – such as Montale translated by Robert Lowell – achieve their vigour by departing from the source: the danger of these looser versions is that the original will seem scanted or imposed on, a stooge. The most rewarding translations in the anthology stretch English towards Italian while not ...”

“... used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the ...”

“... It will end in 2025, with the bicentenary of the end of the wars and the independence of Bolivia. Robert Harvey’s splendid book gives us the first large-scale narrative of Latin America’s struggle for independence in English since – well, when exactly? It is hard to think of any comparable attempt to come to grips with the whole vast story, and in such ...”

“... not an easy thing to have on your conscience that you were personally responsible for putting Robert Mugabe in power but Wilfred Mhanda has had to live with that knowledge for the last 24 years. You might think the last year, which has seen 32 murders, countless cases of rape, torture, arson and beating, all to help Mugabe steal an election, would have ...”

“... be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... told another friend. He wasn’t to be taken as seriously as a distinguished foreigner like Ernst Robert Curtius might think; and Eliot wrote to someone else that he had ‘never found any writer whose views were so antipathetic to me as Murry’s’. Murry seems not to have understood that his polemical position meant they couldn’t have lunch, and must ...”