“... Henson realised his longstanding ambition to present a series of Greek myths in puppet form. Robert Graves might not have approved, but if it hadn’t been for Henson, audiences in Japan would never have heard of the Minotaur or the Gorgon. Long after the Muppets have been quietly forgotten, Henson will be remembered and thanked for Sesame Street, beyond ...”

“... a minority has always spurned the past. The past intimidates, threatens and diminishes us. For Robert Browning’s ‘Paracelsus’, it was written on a ‘sullen page’. The past is regarded as a brake on progress, paralysing creative energy. It is invested with determinative force. It undermines self-confidence – for George Gilbert Scott it doomed ...”

“... is stringent as situation and acquiescent as plot. Elizabeth Barrett pinpointed the malaise which Robert Browning probed: ‘When a man spins evermore on his own axis, like a child’s toy I saw the other day ... what is the use of him but to make a noise?’ And when a man like Horace Nettleship or a gentleman (perhaps) like Waldo Chatterway spins evermore ...”

“... pale mother nourishes her child to the deadly slaughter.’ So oppressive were the rich and great, Robert Crowley declared in 1550, that ‘we must needs fight it out, or else be brought to the like slavery that the Frenchmen are in!’ ‘European slavery is indeed a state of liberty, if compared with that which prevails in the other three divisions of the ...”

“... of her recent battle with cancer. Was she having an affair, pre-Rossellini, with the photographer Robert Capa? (Her co-author describes their love as ‘an association that left them both worried slightly’.) Where did all that Hollywood money go? Rossellini wondered, when she came to Italy, why she had no jewels or furs or other sign of her big-earning ...”

“... by them that are on display here. For example, Brassaï’s Bijou of Montparnasse (1932), Robert Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Militiaman (1936), Kertész’s Satiric Dancer (1926), László Moholy-Nagy’s Berlin Radio Tower (1928) all have their place in a tally of the 20th century’s most memorable images. The last of the five, Martin ...”

“... are mingling, too, with many who are long dead. Ronald Reagan and Meryl Streep, Bette Davis and Robert De Niro jostle closely together in several large spaces, chambers for different sins in the afterlife – for vamping, sharp-shooting, taxi-driving – while a flickering crowd comes and goes in an endless loop on screens and monitors. The stars have been ...”

“... anyone wants to remember this now – George W. Bush inheriting the mantle of Winston Churchill. Robert Conquest, presenting a relatively sophisticated, unmilitaristic and tolerant version of the Anglosphere (it included Nigeria and India) in Reflections on a Ravaged Century contrasted ‘the European political tradition’ with what he called the ‘law and ...”

“... the shape of Jane Greer, may also really care for the man she is framing and using, a very young Robert Mitchum. This complexity is not going to do her any good, because both the plot and Mitchum believe in the simpler story of her murderous guile. But we are left wondering if there isn’t some sort of baffled innocence lurking in her evildoings. The ...”

“... no, very old actors – to become the age the time of the action requires. The 76-year-old Robert De Niro gets to play the 40-year-old Sheeran, as well as the same man at 55 and 83. For the record, Harvey Keitel (b. 1939), Al Pacino (b. 1940) and Joe Pesci (b. 1943) also get to inhabit different times, though Pacino, as Jimmy Hoffa, doesn’t live so ...”

“... on activists or the lawyers who defend them. In sentencing the Preston New Road campaigners, Judge Robert Altham said that the defendants’ views on the dangers posed by fracking made them more deserving of prison sentences, not less, because there was ‘no realistic prospect of rehabilitation’. Since he refused to hear evidence related to the case against ...”

“... Ulysses is to the novel between the wars and what The Waste Land is to poetry’, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana ‘is to the travel book’. ‘To sketch the history of the British imaginative intercourse with the Mediterranean in modern times is virtually to present a survey of modern British literature.’ This last, at least, really ...”

“... Exter’s interest in vivid colour (the two women met in Paris in 1911), and with her husband, Robert Delaunay, developed a technique they called Simultanism, in which contrasting colours are placed alongside each other, or allowed to overlap, creating an impression of motion and gesture. Exter’s Composition (Genoa) of 1912 is displayed next to ...”

“... John Croker, for whom the rotten boroughs were the essence of freedom and prosperity; Sir Robert Inglis, who proclaimed that ‘this House would not be bound by the cries of a majority of the people’, and Lord Lyndhurst, who is described by Pearce as a ‘gladiator’. Much more appetising is the contempt in which Cobbett held the Whig reformers. In ...”

“... Michals’s collage portrait of the Sterling Black and Whiters – Ansel Adams, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Salgado and so on – shows us which reputations were overshadowed by the new high-art photography. At the Tate there are photographs from both camps. One odd effect of the high art/common craft division is that while magazines and newspapers are ...”