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“... Robert Harris’s first novel, Fatherland (1992), was a counterfactual historical thriller set in Nazi Germany in 1964. In the alternative reality of the book, Germany defeated the Soviet Union in the Caucasus in 1943, lured the Royal Navy to its destruction after learning that the British had cracked the Enigma code, and intimidated the United States into signing a peace treaty by successfully testing an atom bomb and launching an intercontinental V3 rocket across the Atlantic ...”

“... plutonium bomb exploded on the Jornada del Muerto near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, Robert Oppenheimer, the Scientific Director of Los Alamos, remembered the line from the Bhagavad Gita where Vishnu says: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ One other remark deserves to be immortalised, which Oppenheimer himself later judged the ...”

“... Robert Schumann died in an asylum near Bonn in 1856, having committed himself there two years before, following a suicidal plunge into the Rhine near his home in Düsseldorf. He had had many periods of depression and anxiety before that, and biographers have tended to regard his life as a continuous fight against the congenital mental instability to which the deaths of his sister and father when he was in his teens have also been attributed ...”

“... Daniell wrote a pamphlet on The New Trade Unionism with a handsome Scottish radical called Robert Allan Nicol (a ‘Shelleyan type’), which, rather than discussing pickets, looked forward to ‘the union of the Souls of Mankind in a perfect Love’. Daniell had met Nicol when she was still married, during a trip to Edinburgh for medical treatment in ...”

“... removal centre at Gatwick, then to Brighton, then to Suffolk. Grace and her children, Sacha and Robert, get swept along in the car after one of Smith’s characteristic accidental encounters, on Brighton beach. A long central section, a third of the novel, takes place in the past, where we return with Daniel to his wartime internment as an enemy alien on ...”

“... whose abilities the state as well as himself might benefit. Of these, Lionel Cranfield and Sir Robert Cotton were among the most notable. They served him well. The management of the Great Farm, and the cloth dispute between England and the Spanish Netherlands, are illustrations of the use to which a patron as powerful as Northampton could put the knowledge ...”

“... infringement of what he said were the rules, but he calms down after that. In the other film, Robert Shaw, as the gang leader, also executes someone, but he is clearly making a point, and doesn’t get the hectic pleasure out of his deed that Travolta manifestly does. Throughout the new film, various people insist that the incident has nothing to do with ...”

“... we know what sort of film this is, and we wait and see. It Follows, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, offers an extraordinary mixture of over and under-statement, with almost nothing in between. In the scene I have just described, and indeed throughout the movie, the soundtrack, composed by an outfit called Disasterpeace, crashes and thumps ...”

“... notorious ‘surgeon’s photograph’, said to have been taken by a London gynaecologist called Robert Kenneth Wilson. (It’s still the best-known image: something like Rod Hull’s Emu in grainy profile.) The monster’s celebrity is bound up with the rise of tabloids and motor trips; as Byrne notes in a video interview shown in the gallery foyer, the ...”

“... teaching poetry workshops at St Mark’s Church, collaborating with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley and others. John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were their guiding lights. A new American poetics was taking shape: daily and referential, tough and casual. Between 1967 and 1969 Mayer edited, with Vito Acconci, the experimental mimeographed magazine 0 ...”

“... many devoted friends at Harvard (as Millier notes), ranging from Octavio Paz to William Alfred and Robert Fitzgerald, and in her writing courses found students whom she admired and liked, both male and female. She also found a new person to love, Alice Methfessel, the administrative assistant at Kirkland House (the student residence where Bishop was first ...”

“... justice department to investigate Cohen’s father-in-law. But the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has stayed on course, and on 25 January another close associate of Trump, Roger Stone, who professed to have advance knowledge of a WikiLeaks release of the DNC documents, was arrested in Fort Lauderdale. Stone is charged with seven ...”

“... up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages on these (and other) periods: none so rich as the gathering of 1 June 1969 at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara ...”

“... motions but we’re no longer in control.’ I received this text message on 9 August 2009 from Robert Bourgi, known in Paris as ‘the attorney of la Françafrique’. It’s probably not the last word on France’s incestuous relationship with her former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, but it put an end to my four-day wait at a rat-infested border ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”