“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sonnet has, of course, survived many transmutations in its long history: Hopkins, Mallarmé and Robert Lowell have all tested its strength beyond what some might consider legitimate extremes – and yet it cannot be denied that a sense of the traditional form is essential to their work. John Hewitt’s book, Kites in Spring, containing his reminiscences of ...”

“... might have developed without the railway, or the South without slavery (both actual projects of Robert Fogel), a style of thought which seems bafflingly indeterminate yet at the same time is closely associated with causal claims in history which most people want to be able to make. These topics both get pretty short treatment compared with the central topic ...”

“... very strong as a man who understands these matters. In a comprehensive attack on the reputation of Robert Lowell, in 1973, he wrote as follows: ‘Endless, aimless consecutive sentences. The words do not coalesce into a good substance. They are difficult to say and knobbly to hear, their awkwardnesses are unconvincing, unjustifiable, they do not measure or ...”

“... xxii, 1-2). We are well clear of Adam Smith by now, and still going strong, but the next hop, to Robert Lowe, marks the turn for home. For Lowe is introduced as a radical Utilitarian administrator (see Utilitarianism). Utilitarianism naturally leads us to Jeremy Bentham, and Bentham equally naturally back to Utilitarianism. This makes no difference ...”

“... new flats to be built on the square’s old bomb site. In his monograph on Auerbach from 1990, Robert Hughes writes that ‘the flavour of Camden Town recalls a fact of Sickert’s work which applies to Auerbach’s today: its attachment to the common-and-garden, to the compost of life.’ Compost? That word implies fertility and regeneration, but ...”

“... know that Milton translated his poems into Latin and back again, or that the first nine poems in Robert Frost’s first book correspond to the first nine cantos of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Rather than consolidate such knowledge and put it into practice, our institutionalised creative writing programmes seem to have buried it as radioactive waste. Mnemosyne ...”

“... such bacilli existed. The epidemic had struck at a crucial juncture. Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Imperial Berlin had pioneered the germ theory of disease, which attributed lethal epidemics to invasive micro-organisms. But this new bacteriology did not enjoy an instantaneous or universal triumph. To many it seemed like a warmed-up version of ...”