How do I prevent the HTML markup in an item list from being escaped? As you can see in the code below, I try various ways to prevent Drupal from escaping the HTML and passing the link tags to the output, including the use of '#allowed_tags' and the Markup class.  None of these approaches are working.

$text = t('Administer books');

$markup = new Markup();
$link = $markup-&gt;create(Link::fromTextAndUrl($text, $url)-&gt;toString());

$items[] = $link . ': ' . t('Browse books and edit fields') . '.';

$text = t('Import books');
$url = new Url('mei_marc.import');

$items[] = Link::fromTextAndUrl($text, $url)-&gt;toString() . ': ' . t('Visit this page to import a book') . '.';

$array['mei_marc_list'] = array(
  '#theme' =&gt; 'item_list',
  '#list_type' =&gt; 'ul',
  '#title' =&gt; '',
  '#items' =&gt; $items,
  '#allowed_tags' =&gt; ['a'],
);

$txt = drupal_render($array);

$markup = new Markup();

$list = $markup-&gt;create($txt);

return ['#markup' =&gt; $list];


The output is the following.

&lt;div class="item-list"&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;/mei_marc/list&amp;quot;&amp;gt;Administer books&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;: Browse books and edit fields.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;/admin/mei_library/import&amp;quot;&amp;gt;Import books&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;: Visit this page to import a book.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
$items[] = [
  '#markup' =&gt; Link::fromTextAndUrl($text, $url)-&gt;toString() . ': ' . t('Visit this page to import a book') . '.',
];

$form['mei_marc_list'] = [
  '#theme' =&gt; 'item_list',
  '#items' =&gt; $items,
];

return $form;