“... last two years of Elizabeth’s life, James began a secret correspondence with her chief minister, Robert Cecil. It was, Jackson writes, ‘precisely James’s skills as a dissembler and his success at subterfuge that assisted his accession as English king’ – and ensured a smooth succession. To become​ a king of multiple territories was challenging, but ...”

“... after Mynors Bright, a retired president of Magdalene, issued a six-volume edition of the diary. Robert Louis Stevenson, reviewing it in the Cornhill Magazine, could tell that much was still missing – stories often didn’t cohere – and complained that ‘when we purchase six huge and distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled to be treated rather ...”

“... flat that he has enjoyed ‘an evening back at Trinity’.23 February. Enjoyable conversation with Robert Chote of the FT, who has just written a piece for the magazine Prospect about Gordon Brown, but not with co-operation from the subject. We discuss Brown’s mixture of unmistakable ability and equally unmistakable distrust of those who aren’t in his ...”

“... pre-Reformation who nobly gave his head to forces beyond his control. Most absurdly, because of Robert Bolt’s screenplay, this barrister of Catholic repression is widely envisioned as modernity’s diapason: the clear, strong note of individual conscience, sounding against the authoritarian intolerance of the Early Modern state. Thomas More died in ...”

“... They include Mr Gerald Albertini, The Rt Hon. Peter Archer MP, Miss Amanda Aspinall, Dr Robert Aspinall, The Duke of Atholl, Miss Julie Battersea, Mr Tom Begg, Dr Kurt Benirschke, Mr Robin Birley, Mr Anthony Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David Crouch ...”

“... Galaxy), dictionaries (John Sutherland’s Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction), biographies (Robert Patten’s Charles Dickens and His Publishers), memoirs (Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built), compendia of anecdotes (Alberto Manguel’s History of Reading), exhibition catalogues (the Folger Library’s The Reader Revealed) and maps (Franco ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in pretending to help people ...”

“... of ancient religions despite the best efforts of the best scholars to discover some kind of order. Robert Parker in Polytheism and Society at Athens, his synthetic study of gods and cults in one small but document-rich area, compares the ever-increasing pantheon to an overflowing clothes-drawer, ‘which no one felt obliged to tidy’. Nevertheless, he wants ...”

“... sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at least, seems assured. That position rests, above all ...”

“... one that washes over you when you see flights advertised for 99p: something just isn’t right. Robert Greenwald’s documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price makes a strong argument about what exactly is not right. It boils down to the question of just how Wal-Mart achieves its control of costs – a word which, in a business context, to a large ...”

“... had been, handing out large sums at unpredictable moments (for example, to his old wartime friend Robert Graves, but only after they had ceased to be real friends).Sassoon was a great self-fashioner. He was also intensely self-aware, open-hearted (though capable of mean-spiritedness), restless, prickly, brave, idealistic, never content, eternally tussling ...”

“... to discover the Counter-Reformation is a very old one, first advanced by the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Parsons. In a lengthy memorandum he composed in the 1590s, sketching out a reform agenda should Elizabeth be succeeded by a Catholic, Parsons suggested that Mary’s attempt to reimpose Catholicism had failed because it was ‘huddled’ and ‘shuffled up ...”

“... photographs, have been commonplace since at least the American Civil War. In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites are less concerned with these debates than with the ways in which iconic images have been used to propose and renegotiate various kinds of ‘democratic citizenship’ and ‘civic identity’. Here original truths matter ...”

“... but unreliable in ways that can’t be gauged. Then we’ll ‘march on’, as the MIT economist Robert Pindyck puts it, acting as if we have knowledge we don’t really have.This is sometimes called the problem of ‘fat tails’, that is, possibility that PDFs underestimate the probability of extreme ‘tail events’. Models with thin tails concentrate ...”