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“... gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an hour,’ as ...”

“... passion for lavish décor’ and ‘his fascination with the Nazis’. Part of the evidence for Roy Jenkins’s repressed urges (though ‘there can be no doubt’ of his ‘keen and exclusive interest in women’) is that he was part of a secret canasta school at Westminster. In the case of Winston Churchill, evidence for repressed homosexuality includes ...”

“... education – above all, by expanding education for adults. It would decentralise government and foster local élites, with the power and will to challenge the South-Eastern establishment. It would recognise that the two biggest pools of untapped talent in this country are women and racial minorities, and it would try to stamp out discrimination against ...”

“... by contrast, offers dialogue that an actor might roll about his tongue. The principal narrator is Roy Croucher, an unreasonably self-satisfied Londoner, in his fifties, with experience of jungle warfare in Malaya and a subversively conservative attitude towards anything that smacks of modernisation. Croucher spies on lovers, dyes his enemies’ milk ...”

“... this practice: the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford, for example, calls himself R.F. Foster when in full academic dress and Roy when in more shirt-sleeved mode. But it may be a sign of Taylor’s intense attachment to early 20th-century English writing, a period on which it is hard to outmatch his ...”

“... Dale has, I think, successfully followed in the footsteps of other Nihonjinron-bashers such as Roy Andrew Miller, the author of Japan’s Modern Myth (1982), in proving that the Japanese are not as unique as they think. This, in itself, would not be proving very much. What else does Dale have to say? Two things, it seems. First, that the Nihonjinron ...”

“... of its local premises, and to welcome the new secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Labour’s Roy Mason. Mason took the opportunity to launch a ferocious attack – ‘a thermonuclear explosion of rage and spleen’, according to one of those in attendance – on the BBC’s record in Northern Ireland. One BBC veteran described the evening as ‘the most ...”

“... in Women’ and of ‘the Use and Action of the Genitals’. This cursory description confirms Roy Porter’s argument in ’Tis Nature’s Fault that, although well-known, Aristotle’s Masterpiece has too often been dismissed as ‘a mere catchpenny pamphlet’. In a careful exegetical study Porter argues that ‘far from being a pot-pourri of remnants ...”

“... capture of ‘a tiny insight typically having to do with innocence violated’. Its heroes are Roy Lichtenstein, whose blown-up comic strips, Barthelme says, ask us to question ‘a society in which these things are seen as art’; Norman O. Brown, for championing eros and play; and, above all, Samuel Beckett. Barthelme’s whole career can be seen as an ...”

“... structural and connected to America’s experience of war. Military success has helped to foster constitutional stasis and complacency. The UK exhibits comparable problems, but to a more pronounced degree. Like the US, but over a longer period of time, the UK has been both a markedly warlike state and generally a successful one. In the mid-17th ...”

“... when conscripted and shaped more by the politics of the 1930s than by the early war years. Roy Ridgway, born in Liverpool, came from a pacifist family and was a member of the Peace Pledge Union; Ronald Duncan, an idealistic Cambridge graduate, had travelled to India to see Gandhi’s movement first hand; Fred Urquhart, a working-class Scot with ...”

“... besides, the natural tendency of political biographers to concentrate on the political struggle. Roy Jenkins’s life gives us an entrancing account of the life of Victorian politicians: when they went to bed and got up, what they drank, what trains they took (Jenkins was a Bradshaw buff). But about what went on in Gladstone’s head Jenkins leaves us not ...”

“... is a mysterious foundling, identified only by his preposterous name, brought up by elderly foster-parents in the village of Entepfuhl (based on Ecclefechan where Carlyle was born). Details of his early life, before acquiring his post at the new University of Weissnichtwo, are represented as sketchy and possibly unreliable, but we understand that the ...”

“... species; inherent human destructiveness only awaited technological progress to be realised. Roy Scranton, in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015), is less deterministic than Kolbert’s Faustian scientist but no less gloomy. Whether or not humanity might once have elected a different course, by now it’s too late: ‘The greatest challenge we ...”

“... embodiment of international law. 2. Massive intervention on this scale in the Middle East can only foster anti-Western terrorism. Rather than helping to crush al-Qaida, it is likely to multiply recruits for it. America will be more endangered after a war with Iraq than before it. 3. The blitz in preparation is a pre-emptive strike, openly declared to be ...”