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“... illegally supplementing her meagre welfare benefits with two jobs. National Public Radio’s Cokie Roberts, the sister of Washington’s most prominent lobbyist, Tommy Boggs, is the wife of US News and World Report’s reporter, Steve Roberts. The Fort Lauderdale Junior League paid Cokie ...”

“... or Menlove Edwards’s laceratingly self-critical ‘symptoms of some psyclioneurotic disorder’. Michael Roberts, a notable literary editor in the Thirties, reviewing ‘The Poetry and Humour of Mountaineering’ in the Alpine Journal for 1941, opined that the risking and gruelling of oneself on climbs were good because ‘they show superiority to all ...”

“... that forgotten class of dope dealers in late Sixties Manhattan: the doctors. For example, Doctor Roberts, made famous by the Beatles song, who would shoot up his patients with vitamins and methedrine. According to Cherry Vanilla, a client, ‘you’d go round to Doctor Roberts, and after the shots you’d get very ...”

“... history of the antebellum South, much less become a historian of Southern intellectuals? Michael O’Brien has been working on an answer to these questions for fifteen years, and the result is a massive refutation of received wisdom. His first task is to persuade a sceptical audience of the mere existence of Southern intellectual life between 1810 ...”

“... other writers.’ As Gelpi rightly points out, Day Lewis did always have his defenders. Early on, Michael Roberts claimed that From Feathers to Iron (1931) was ‘a landmark, in the sense in which Leaves of Grass, A Shropshire Lad, Des Imagistes and The Waste Land were landmarks’. And on the occasion of his death, Kingsley Amis declared that Day ...”

“... about half an hour I was beginning to feel some of the old tension and contentment. Then Graham Roberts struck. With the ball nowhere in sight, Spurs’ neanderthal defender followed through on Charlie Nicholas with such force that the Scot was hurtled over the groundside hoardings into about the fifth row of the concrete enclosure. He was lucky to escape ...”

“... Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style here but ...”

“... Reunion and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats were at a late stage, and a few days after Michael Roberts had commented to him that ‘Macavity is the feline analogue of the late Professor Moriarty’, Eliot was holidaying at Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire along with Emily Hale’s relatives, and probably Emily herself. There he received a ...”

“... relative importance.’ Compare with this a sociological example taken from a recent study by Michael Roberts of the rise of a Karava élite in Sri Lanka. It can plausibly be explained as due to their adoption of Catholicism, to their involvement in catamaran fishing (and hence their evolution into a class of capitalist boat-owners), to their ...”

“... In 1891, Bérenger Sauniere, curé of Rennesle-Château, a remote village in the Cevennes, discovered hidden in the structure of his church four parchments, two of them written in the 18th century and partly in code, two earlier and containing genealogies (still not published). There were references to Dagobert II, the Merovingian king, to Sion, and to treasure said to be Merovingian ...”

“... with Primetime Live rather than going to NBC’s Dateline), and misbehaving celebrities like Julia Roberts, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson are their meat. On the evening in question, Primetime Live had managed to get hold of a recent O.J. girlfriend – a pretty, big-eyed, unbelievably stupid model – who insisted that ...”

“... is that he’s a die-hard monarchist, as he reveals in his memoir, A Royal Duty (Michael Joseph, £17.99), a book at once agonisingly boring and shamefully fascinating. Much the most interesting bits are the insights into such things as what the Queen has (or used to have) for breakfast: ‘one slice of granary toast, a smear of butter and a ...”

“... be a greater weight of plastic in the seas than fish. The secretary of state for the environment, Michael Gove, watching Blue Planet 2 and moved by images of, among other things, a turtle caught in plastic, tweeted that ‘the imperative to do more to tackle plastic in our oceans is clear.’ What should be done? New laws could be passed. But that will help ...”

“... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...”

“... If you took​ only the subject matter of Michael Ondaatje’s novels into account, you would expect him to be an austere and even punishing writer. He chooses the darkest material, chronicles passages of life that would test the most resilient cheerfulness. Coming through Slaughter (1976) is loosely based on the tragic life of the jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, who died in an asylum in New Orleans ...”