“... of course. In their report, the inspectors single out for praise the clerk who attended on them, Robert Aslett, for his unfailing diligence. Aslett later rose to become Second Cashier and was in line for the top job, but he lost thousands on private speculations and stole thousands more in Exchequer bills to cover his losses. He was condemned to death, the ...”

“... a slave-driver’s lash. Scots, in that sense, were the non-commissioned officers of empire; even Robert Burns, a sentimental abolitionist, planned to take a job in Jamaica as an overseer of slaves. The same myth suggested that Gaelic emigrants raised in a clan system had a special rapport with traditional societies. In fact, Highlanders behaved with ...”

“... has declined, so a sturdier population grows to an age where death comes by erosion rather than by conquest, and care of the sick is correspondingly more protracted and expensive. Partly it is the achievement of science in holding that erosion at bay: the technology of soul transplants has not changed much in two millennia (though Americans, as always, find ...”

“... to the central reality of their time: that the Soviet Union was a regime committed to world conquest, ‘a state which, because of the character of its leaders, its ideology and its internal mood, could not have fitted into any design to create a tranquil world’. Ultimately, of course, the West came to its senses and abandoned its futile efforts to ...”

“... alone have the qualities which ensure success.’ The youthful and inexperienced naval officer Robert Scott was taken up by Markham and eventually given the job of reaching the Pole ahead of the suspiciously efficient Norwegian, Amundsen. There was talk of science to seal the legitimacy of the enterprise – meteorology, geomagnetism and mapping – but ...”

“... brought the Seven Years’ War to an end and extended Britain’s imperial possessions. Wealth and conquest fanned a mood of triumphal jubilation. Goldsmith regarded it sourly: When I behold a factious band agree To call it freedom when themselves are free; Each wanton judge new penal statutes draw, Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.His political ...”

“... by Christian regimes, yet his overall picture of the 13th century is strongly positive. Contrast Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change, published in 1993. Bartlett’s focus is on the hard edge and sometimes brutal racism of the processes indicated in his subtitle – racism ...”

“... There is more here than meets the eye: ‘Agapē Agape is a satirical celebration of the conquest of technology and of the place of art and the artist in a technological democracy,’ Gaddis wrote in a proposal from the early 1960s. ‘As “The Secret History of the Player Piano”, it pursues America’s growth in terms of the evolution of the ...”

“... verse. The treatise applies to Persian literature the sublime aesthetics of the Oxford Orientalist Robert Lowth, for whom the terse passion of ancient Hebrew poetry (Job and Psalms especially) had expressive powers unmatched by the regulated, decorous traditions of classical verse. Generous illustrations from the 14th-century poet Hāfiz decorated the work ...”

“... as a Landser, a common soldier without any ideological motives. The otherwise unidentified diarist Robert R. recorded with evident unease the atrocities in which he had to participate in the war against the Soviet Union, including the shooting of prisoners and the torching of villages, but convinced himself that it was necessary to carry on fighting so that ...”

“... souls without interference, they would see that they have a greater stake in liberty than in the conquest of political authority.’ But Rousseau and Kant, while developing a less mechanical view of human nature, put these advances at risk. Rousseau attributed religious feeling not to fear and ignorance, but to conscience, which was a better moral compass ...”

“... treated his heroine without mercy. In The Testament of Cresseid, a sequel by the Scots poet Robert Henryson, Cresseid is reduced to prostitution and – by counsel of the gods – stricken with leprosy. Chaucer borrowed the plots of both ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and Troilus and Criseyde from Boccaccio, who was still alive during his first trip to ...”

“... now encouraged to check their privilege, can’t claim victimhood without obscuring the fact that conquest and colonisation endowed them with disproportionate wealth, power and intellectual authority. Unnerved by the prospect of decline, some members of this exalted minority began to conflate their own relative diminution with a more general ...”

“... a very Parisian affair, but without any women – he’s introduced to its new director, Robert Rediger, who invites him to dinner. Rediger is a man of his times: a convert to Islam and an ally of Ben Abbes. (The name is a twist on Robert Redeker, a right-wing journalist who in 2006 went into hiding after receiving ...”

“... plans for a new show set in an alternative reality, in which the Confederate South, led by General Robert E. Lee, has successfully seceded from the Union. D.B. Weiss, one of the producers of Confederate, explained the thinking behind the series: ‘What would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked DC, if the South had won – that just always fascinated ...”