“... 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 ...”

“... the Nazi leaders. As early as July 1933, with Hitler only just ensconced as German Chancellor, Robert Bruce-Lockhart records conversations between the Prince and the grandson of the former Kaiser, Prince Louis-Ferdinand: ‘The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re ...”

“... Such modelling affects us as ontological metaphor. The art collection inherited and extended by Robert Lehman, vice-president of the Metropolitan Museum in New York from 1941 to 1967 and chairman of the board there from 1967 until his death in 1969, was presented posthumously to that museum by his Foundation in accordance with his wishes. The terms dictated ...”

“... from him. The sad thing is that in real life Mr Carter is a literary journalist of some repute. As Robert Haupt’s successor to the editorship of the Age Monthly Review, he inhabits a milieu, or space, in which the standards of plain speaking were set by the redoubtable Michael Davie, who really should get back there and sort out his errant protégés as soon ...”

“... obvious solution to anyone struggling to make a living out of writing. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, all did their time on studio payrolls, and West and Fitzgerald in their respective last works, The Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon, somehow succeeded in putting its ridiculous myths to serious ...”

“... setting and display the ideological input into his science are not new, however. For two decades Robert Young has been preaching that Darwin’s Malthusian science was inseparable from the social and economic issues of his class and culture – part of a changing philosophy of nature accompanying a shifting social order. Six of Young’s seminal essays ...”

“... reform. It remains an open question whether Castro will be that ‘pragmatic’ even now. Robert Quirk’s new biography devotes only 34 pages to the Eighties and Nineties. Otherwise, the topics covered by earlier biographies are exhaustively recapitulated, at the expense of the subsequent developments that invite reappraisal of Castro’s whole ...”

“... Something was supposed to stick, and stick it did thanks to the assiduous repetitions of Captain Robert Maxwell and his ‘Labour paper’. But the actual money, as Milne shows, cannot have and did not come from Libya. And the timing of its deployment and discovery was so exquisitely calibrated as to require the intervention of someone with knowledge gained ...”

“... In the early Eighties, Western governments, notably those of America, Britain and France, were anxious to assess the probable rate of growth and pathways of infection of Aids. They sponsored extensive sex surveys in order to find out, for example, the number of sexual partners an average male had in his lifetime and how many used safe sex. The British survey was carried out by four women, primarily trained in medical statistics, epidemiology and health care ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be. And the governments in which he has served have done some very un-nice things indeed. As Robert Taylor points out in his trenchant essay on industrial relations, ‘prime ministerial words of compassion were often belied by harshness of executive action.’ Indeed, the Government seems largely insensitive to the poverty its policies have created and ...”

“... Picasso’s position was by no means inevitable within the avant-garde circles of his day. Robert and Sonia Delaunay, both of them practising artists of considerable originality, must have maintained a very different kind of relationship from that of Picasso and Fernande or Picasso and Ewa. Paradoxically, given his tendency to excuse or justify ...”

“... trying to steal apples; standing rapt before a fruit stall, gazing at ripe pears. Today it’s Robert and Jon who are on a spree: they steal a yoghurt, a milkshake, two cartons of Ambrosia rice. Finally they steal a child, blond-haired, not quite three. One of them takes him by the hand. They lead him into the city. They walk some busy roads, they are seen ...”

“... not come back. In the first poem in My Alexandria, ‘Demolition’, Doty invokes the ghost of Robert Lowell: many of the poems take their bearings from Lowell’s clotted diction, from what Doty calls his ‘ruthless energy’, from Lowell’s interest in burning the poem onto the page, heaping on adjectives to fuel the fire, invoking the Old ...”

“... the public, at Buscot Park.) Some of these figures acquire a larger life in Macleod’s main text: Robert Vernon, son of a prosperous tradesman, who like Mr Bounderby exaggerated the lowliness of his origins; John Sheepshanks, so shabbily dressed that he was once refused admission to a first-class railway carriage, who told raucous jokes to the Prime Minister ...”