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“... have no idea what it contains. In the 17th century, it was in the possession of the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly ...”

“... and cosy corner-shop atmosphere: exterminate and replace them. The mastermind behind Crown was Robert Haft, a Harvard Business School graduate who had written his master’s thesis on retail discounting. Crown’s philosophy, as displayed on South Lake, was predatory. Find an existing profitable outlet, set up alongside it, discount the neighbour into ...”

“... out licences, at the risk of being prosecuted as ‘pirates’. A London radio aficionado called Robert Ford began taunting the government with his illegal unlicensed radio listening. The government was initially reluctant to prosecute, but eventually his home was searched, his radio was found, and he was arrested. He insisted on being jailed, proclaiming ...”

“... and for a new centrist political party appears to have been driven by her infatuation with Lord Robert Cecil (Holmes doesn’t make entirely clear whether this was romantic). ‘I do not approve of extremes in politics,’ she wrote. ‘I distrust Revolution on the one hand and Reaction on the other, and I believe we ought to pursue a middle course.’ She ...”

“... in a Ship, as well as in the State’). A good woman was ‘like a ship’, the preacher Robert Wilkinson ventured, because ‘her countenance and conversation are ballasted with soberness and gravity’ – though she ‘must not have one quality of a ship, and that is too much rigging’.Beneath the bluster, however, was hard-nosed calculation. A ...”

“... Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Wölfli, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes. Or if Robert Crumb had turned into his obsessive mad-genius brother, Charles Crumb. If thisweredrawn byKirby inthe 1970sit wouldbe a massivegleaminghystericallyhyperarticulatedpsychedelicedifice ...”

“... water on the side of a narrow-boat during a family holiday with another Tory MP, the somewhat wet Robert Atkins. During that trip he asked Mr Atkins point blank whether there was any realistic possibility of him becoming prime minister. Anderson records that the two men decided there and then that there was, but that his best tactic was to avoid being ...”

“... in the quantum mechanics enthusiasm of several of the brilliant young scientists – they included Robert Oppenheimer, Pascual Jordan and Victor Weisskopf – who had come to the university to pursue the new theory. ‘I learned at an early age that science is a haven for the timid, the freaks, the misfits,’ Delbrück later mused: ‘If you were a student in ...”

“... of her flirtation with her brother-in-law, Clive Bell. Elizabeth Barrett turns out to be Vanessa, Robert Browning is revealed as Clive, and Flush is, of course, Virginia herself, the jealous third party. The extraordinary weight that Trombley places on Woolf’s guilt over this episode, which he considers one of the ‘two pivotal crises’ of her life, is ...”

“... an artist without understanding his relationship to Diego, yet Lord is – with the exception of Robert Wernick – the first writer on him to do justice to that subject. He delineates subtly and accurately the relationship they seemed to have when one knew them, in middle age and onwards. And he unearths events and habits in their childhood and youth which ...”

“... Malcolm Yorke says more about ‘excesses of amorous nature’ than friends and disciples do (like Robert Speaight, whose biography came out in 1966), in whose hands his reputation has largely rested. The very presence of a woman was a temptation and incitement: he had Ayatollah-like ideas about women’s clothing – perhaps a reflection of his ...”

“... described by Sargent in his letter to James as ‘the unique extra-human’. That would be Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac. This scion of the nobility (he was descended from d’Artagnan) is familiar to many of us who might not know his name, because he was the inspiration for more major fictional characters than any one person could ever aspire to ...”

“... You can follow the same trail that led to a network ban in the US on the repeat showing of a Robert Fisk documentary criticising Israel. If enough powerful people – which means enough people with control over the major public communications in the US – make enough noise on behalf of victims in their team (more deserving of interest and concern than ...”

“... or desire. There are few scenes more melancholy in 19th-century fiction, or in paintings such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home, than the enforced sale of household goods. Thackeray made a specialism of clearance, in Vanity Fair and then again in The Newcomes; George Eliot followed suit, at length, in The Mill on the ...”

“... here, for the peculiarity of ‘Tu ti spezzasti’ is in its expressive abandonment of precision. Robert Lowell’s notion, in Imitations, of endeavouring above all to catch ‘the tone’ or, failing that, at least ‘a tone’ seems a better guide. The waywardnesses which are wholly wrong in some of Lowell’s other translations have an aptness in his ...”