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“... 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 ...”

“... that the very term ‘abstract expressionism’ – it was coined in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates writing in the New Yorker about paintings by Hans Hofmann – provides a clue: if one renounces depiction all that is left is expression. But that would be a mistake, one often made when trying to understand some of the best-known works on show ...”

“... Andrew Jarecki had already made a feature film, All Good Things (2010), inspired by the life of Robert Durst, a Manhattan real-estate heir suspected of killing three people. Durst had watched the film, phoned Jarecki and offered to be interviewed. Jarecki had flushed him out with fiction. In the resulting six-part series, Durst emerges as a ...”

“... the blind, is our respect.’ Putting aside, for a moment, the vexed presences of Cecil Rhodes and Robert E. Lee, it is worth considering how many statues – the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association counts 925 in the UK – should continue to enjoy the protection of our respect. Should Charles James Fox? I have often wondered what I would say were I ...”

“... not generally enjoyed by today’s Muslim minorities. Two of my paternal uncles, John and Robert, were blond and blue-eyed. John, in fact, was deployed after war service to the British Mandate force in Palestine. In uniform, he went into a Jewish-owned shop, and the shopkeeper said to a customer to whom she was speaking Yiddish: ‘Just a moment while ...”

“... in 1980, mainly in a hippyish French Quarter teahouse called Until Waiting Fills (a line from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, or a variation on one), where the curtains were never opened. Neither book was so huge as to destabilise the whole experience of reading. Bottom’s Dream does that. I first saw the book on the Newly Arrived shelves ...”

“... of recent months are one of Hoover’s successors, James Comey, and presumed national saviour Robert Mueller. In the liberal imagination now, the FBI and its erstwhile directors are your friends in the #resistance. If FBI agents are as lazy as they used to be when it comes to investigating writers, at least their job is much easier than it once was: these ...”

“... house in Highgate, found impossible to imagine. About ten years ago I discovered that Greta Hall, Robert Southey’s house in Keswick, was available for holiday lets, and that one of the bedrooms still had the four-poster in which Coleridge had slept. I booked it and drove Michael up there. He knew the Lakes much better than I did, having walked them in his ...”

“... make the allusion plain: their columns open out into great branches. The idea goes both ways. Robert Frost wrote of his forest of ‘young fir balsams like a place/Where houses all are churches and have spires’. As god is to man, Friedrich seems to say, so man is to nature: we are the ones who shape it, who isolate and set off its beauty. But the ...”