“... is said. This calls for well-judged ham acting of the kind impeccably displayed by Al Pacino and Robert de Niro in Heat; and in Miami Vice both José (John Ortiz) and Jesus (Luis Tosar) make a fair show of being as sinister as they are supposed to be. The problem is that Colin Farrell, as Crockett, is not up to this kind of self-parody, and Jamie Foxx, as ...”

“... dressing up futility as something else. In her other novels, McDermott tends to argue for what Robert Frost called the need to be versed in country things: the need to understand the indifference of a world that appears to mourn with us. Like Frost, she implies that the best we can do is exploit our own capacity for indifference: ‘They, since they were ...”

“... biography and paraphrase; de Botton generates almost four pages by rearranging sentences from Robert Baldick’s translation of A rebours. And when all else fails, the literary pose gives licence to cod-Proustian long-windedness, replete with ‘it is perhaps’, ‘that which’ and the bogus ‘precisely’. Here, for example, is how he expresses the ...”

“... to spend a life; the extent to which a country property would be devalued if the cartoonist Robert Crumb were to move into the vicinity; and the provenance of urban legends. These subjects, though only transiently present, are neither insubstantial nor incidental to the book’s success. And behind each of them lurks the character of the ...”

“... seems to have wanted to blow up television, ‘the box in the corner’. In the flat of her friend Robert Kee, a great asset to the box in the corner, she glimpsed the Tonight programme, and later recorded: ‘I was bored and rather disgusted, and longed to be able to unhook my gaze from this little fussy square of confusion and noise on the other side of the ...”

“... in past shows (Sonia Terk and Sophie Taeuber, for example, get equal billing with their husbands, Robert Delaunay and Hans Arp). At long last such movements as Italian Futurism and Polish Constructivism are given their due, and lesser figures like the Britons Lawrence Atkinson and Duncan Grant, and the Americans Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan ...”

“... think about the names of the family members: Partita (the sister), Carl Fidelio (the brother) and Robert Eroica (our hero). Within the plot the father was no doubt confusing destiny with a joke when he came up with these names, but Carole Eastman, the very sharp writer of the movie, must have been after something else: an implication perhaps that music, like ...”

“... men who learned Talbot’s process and used it: the brilliant Scottish portraitists D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson, with their studies of Newhaven fisherfolk, the rather less gifted Rev. Calvert Jones, the Frenchman Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, who, though trained in chemistry, had to learn the elements of photography from a Lille chemist said to have ...”

“... W.1, and others. The translations were just as elastic as these cartoon-rubber composites. In the Robert Lowell version actually used by the Sunday Times, ‘Spleen’ opens: I’m like the king of a rain-country, rich but sterile, young but with an old wolf’s itchSteiner’s green-inked envelopes, on the other hand, contained openings like: I am like the ...”

“... called reading The White Goddess ‘the greatest revelation of my life’. The figure of the muse, Robert Graves’s ‘Mother of all Living, the ancient power of fright and lust’, became less burdensome as manifested in The Giantess (c.1950), whose colossal central figure towers over the scene like a Madonna della Misericordia. She cradles an egg; geese fly ...”

“... so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of Norway, though 48 years ago for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and Robin Robertson, or the Irishman John ...”

“... of James Roper, Anna’s great-grandfather. This describes a trip to the Veneto in the company of Robert Browning and the love of his late years, Mrs Bronson. The diary explains that Roper married into the Italian family which was given the Bellini Madonna by the artist in the 16th century in lieu of a debt. It’s written in a style that’s perhaps ...”

“... advertising copywriter), were it not for the participation of the historians Yehoshua Porath and Robert Wistrich, and, most surprisingly, the civil rights activist and professor of law Ruth Gavison. One of Gavison’s two essays proposes introducing an American-style constitution; the other reassesses the legitimacy of the Jewish state, which she now ...”

“... some notable corpses. It got Dickens’s, despite his wish to be buried in Rochester; it got Robert Browning’s, though Browning had wanted his remains to join those of his wife in Florence; and it got most of Thomas Hardy’s – all except the heart, which went to Stinsford. But it never got a toenail of Shakespeare’s. What Watson says about mass ...”

“... traditional form of Lutheranism, for which he looked for sympathy from Rome. In England, Robert Persons and Edmund Campion dished Queen Elizabeth’s notion of constructing, under the umbrella of her intended marriage to the French king’s brother, a coalition between the conservative constituency in her own church and a body of loyalist and ...”