“... nation, they locate identity more in history or achievement than in biology or language. Colonel Robert Monro of Foulis, that old warrior of the Thirty Years’ War, said that the Hanseatic city of Stralsund was lucky to get a Scottish garrison and governor ‘of the onley Nation that was never conquered’. Nothing about the warlike qualities of Celts. And ...”

“... Isis has no air force) and has won almost-endorsements from neoconservative admirers like Robert Kagan, a leading propagandist for the Iraq War. Yet if foreign policy lies at the edge of Sanders’s concerns, he can count on the general knowledge that Obama’s presidency, especially in the first term, was largely a third Bill Clinton term: Rahm ...”

“... to develop his vocabulary of repeated geometric forms. At home for Christmas, he found a copy of Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit (1923) in a flea market. Henri was the leader of the Ashcan School of artists, who portrayed everyday working-class scenes (his students included Edward Hopper); the book opens with the statement that ‘art when really understood ...”

“... to just say ‘dracarys’ and turn her dragons on her opponents – to become ‘draconian’. In Robert Zemeckis’s film adaptation of Beowulf, the dragon is the result of Beowulf’s seduction by the mother of the monster Grendel – the latest iteration of the curse cycle that also produced Grendel. There are exceptions, of course: in recent children’s ...”

“... There is, of course, a long tradition of eccentric locales in the history of detective fiction. Robert van Gulik wrote a series set in ancient imperial China; Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End is set in the Egypt of the pharaohs. However, these settings were clearly exceptions; and part of their appeal was their distance from paradigmatic locations ...”

“... jobs disappearing, Park City reinvented itself as a ski resort, and built slopes, spas and hotels. Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute is about twenty miles away: in 1981 he took over a small Utah film festival and turned it into the most important film festival in the US. Of course, Redford himself isn’t here this year: he’s filming in Prague. Apart ...”

“... and interior design erupted across the country. ‘Everything must now be Egyptian,’ Robert Southey grumbled. ‘The ladies wear crocodile ornaments, and you sit upon a sphinx in a room hung around with mummies, and with the long black lean-armed long-nosed hieroglyphical men, who are enough to make the children afraid to go to bed.’ But nobody ...”

“... swooping through the dark and coming up over a hill. Beautifully shot, as the whole movie is, by Robert Richardson, a welcome Oscar nominee. Then the riders pause. In spite of the apparent evidence of the previous shots, they can’t see. There is something wrong with the placing of the eyeholes in their hoods. They tear at the hoods, curse and quarrel, and ...”

“... Convention, which qualifies the principle of sovereign borders when it comes to asylum claims. Robert Menzies, Australia’s attorney general, said much the same in 1934, though he was on much more solid ground: there was no refugee convention at the time. The offending party was the Czech journalist Egon Kisch, a boisterous, die-hard communist and ...”

“... into the land of the free. Assange has been denounced by everybody from the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, to my nephew Rory, a student at the University of Aberdeen, who believes Assange is alone responsible for a general upswing in the fortunes of computer nerds at the expense of guitar heroes. I have now read a number of the 92,000 reports leaked by ...”

“... can’t speak like gangsters in movies? The two American films made from the story, directed by Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel, in 1946 and 1964 respectively (now re-released together on DVD by the Criterion Collection), very wisely go one better than Hemingway in this matter. They leave the movie joke out. They are up to all kinds of things, but dizzying ...”

“... 1858. His father was a sculptor and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist. The stories contained in his book Romantic Tales from the Punjab, were, he said, of the ‘highest possible antiquity, being ...”

“... been the subject of almost as many films as Billy the Kid and inspired nearly as many books. Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy have both written novels about him; my biography of him appeared in 1976. I was asked by Coutant-Peyre to give him a signed copy. I’d brought an old paperback with me and wrote in it: ‘For Carlos. So many questions I would like to ...”

“... that I’m the landlord of the moon.’ Towards the end he describes his debate on ownership with Robert Stewart of the SNP National Council, considers whether ownership and management by the local community would be the just solution, and concludes that ‘flexible and responsive’ private ownership can be more ‘open’ than ‘exclusive community ...”

“... In 1974 Robert Nozick shattered the political complacency of the philosophical establishment when he published Anarchy, State and Utopia, a book arguing that justice had nothing to do with equality. Justice is about individual property rights, Nozick argued. You get what you make or find or work on (if no one else has made or found or worked on it first), and you get what you bargain for or what others choose for their own good reasons to give you or leave you in their wills ...”