“... religion. The reason for its recent resurrection by libertarians of the New Right, and especially Robert Nozick, is not far to seek. We have strong moral intuitions about the importance of bodily integrity: rape and torture are perhaps the worst evils that humans can experience. These intuitions can be framed in the language of self-ownership: it is because ...”

“... earlier than his, Clarence is undergoing a painful loss of faith, brought on by reading Robert Ingersoll’s Some Mistakes of Moses and other scornful and persuasive incitements to infidelity. His life is ruined, and Updike tells us, with characteristic thoroughness, why this was so and what it felt like. ‘Life’s sounds all rang with a curious ...”

“... is a pity that in 1987 Wintour allowed himself to be inveigled into resuming hostilities through Robert Maxwell’s forlorn London Daily News.) The return of Max Hastings to the paper on which he made his name – first as a rumbustious editor of the Londoner’s Diary from 1975 to 1976 and then as the insouciant liberator of Port Stanley in 1982 – has at ...”

“... novel. Clarke wrote about the penal settlements, more recently and more harshly described by Robert Hughes. While Carey’s hero was held in such places he was flogged with unforgettable violence, his back permanently scarred and furrowed, and two of his fingers severed. (There was a specially destructive New South Wales double ‘cat’.) Having made ...”

“... of Japanese ancestry’ who suffered in the war; the University’s president, Robert Coogan, declared that the memorial’s purpose was ‘to acknowledge the past, honour those our nation wronged, and rededicate ourselves to a future in which such things will never – never – be repeated’. What happened has been addressed before in ...”

“... copies of Peruvian nuns’ habits, or whatever. A great deal of Westwood’s work brings to mind Robert Frost’s remark about ‘playing tennis with the net down’. Which is to say, if you choose, as Westwood has done for much of her career, to ignore commercial imperatives, then creating innovative fashion – exploring the ‘aesthetic effect of a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... radical enough to perceive the link between capitalism and the moral decay they deplore. Recall Robert Bork’s infamous lament in Slouching towards Gomorrah (1996): The entertainment industry is not forcing depravity on an unwilling American public. The demand for decadence is there. That fact does not excuse those who sell such degraded material any more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and forty years later, Nicholas’s grandson and namesake became a singing boy in the household of Robert Cecil, where he learned the lute and viol. The first of young Lanier’s (for want of a better term) diplomatic missions came in 1611, when Cecil sent him to Venice. Musicians and artists were often used as couriers and spies, and Lanier had the advantage ...”

“... by this explanation and ordered that Lowe be bailed and later discharged. Similarly fortunate was Robert Fisher, who sold pins. So did the Pinners’ Company of London, which didn’t like Fisher selling pins improperly. So, in October 1637, he was committed to the custody of a royal messenger on the Pinners’ complaint. The company, in its return, recited ...”

“... important posts but withdrew from consideration – the names would include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Rashid Khalidi and the anti-war Republican senator Chuck Hagel, whose leaked note to George W. Bush may have saved the US from a war with Iran in 2007. If one made it a list of incidents as well as persons, one would have to count the snub to Jimmy ...”