“... rather than paying for them herself. When she gave Kenilworth Castle to her favourite, Robert Dudley, it was both a magnificent gift and a considerable restoration project. He turned it into a palace, and built a new wing in anticipation of the queen’s visit. Her 19-day stay in 1575 became part of the myth of Gloriana, ensuring that as many ...”

“... that this had been ‘a palpable error’. But the heat has never gone out of the tariff question. Robert​ Lighthizer has been wrestling with US trade policy since Reagan’s day. In No Trade Is Free, he gives a passionate defence of the tariffs that he personally negotiated in Trump’s first term. For him, Trump can do no wrong, and with innocent pleasure ...”

“... This background gave Oliver something in common with other leading Parliamentarians, notably Robert and Henry Rich, the earls of Warwick and Holland, descendants of the iniquitous Sir Richard Rich. They were all of them ardent Puritans, but they were also hard-faced men whose forefathers had done well out of the dissolution of the monasteries. The ...”

“... as the unlikely heroes of French history.In The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, Robert Zaretsky sets out to show that Weil’s ideas can still ‘resonate’ with secular readers today. He wants us to learn from Weil, but he also thinks that, undiluted, she is likely to send us running. His solution is to tone her down. The value of ...”

“... democracy created after Germany’s defeat in 1918 which lasted until Hitler murdered it in 1933? Robert Gerwarth’s book adds to the recent revisions of Weimar by historians out to rescue that particular Germany from popular and international cliché. He refuses to see it as a state doomed from the start by inflation, violence and the collapse of moral ...”

“... Jeanne-Claude, Rachel Whiteread, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Koons (who in fact used basketballs), Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, once again he doesn’t trouble us with names, as if that would be to indulge such artists further. These swipes are an odd fit in a book that means to illuminate the current interplay between architecture and the other ...”

“... British physicist who later spied for the Soviets from deep within the Manhattan Project. But when Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Los Alamos laboratory, asked him to work full-time on the Manhattan Project, Dirac declined. His leftist sympathies gave him some problems after the war. He was denied a visa to enter the United States in May ...”

“... that with hindsight, if I had been a Cuban leader, I think I might have expected a US invasion,’ Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defence secretary, confessed in 1989. ‘I should say, as well, if I had been a Soviet leader at the time, I might have come to the same conclusion.’ Lipman offers a new and compelling angle on the crisis by examining what was ...”

“... exchanges,’ Hughes says in one of his more oracular moments, ‘we may perhaps look forward to Robert Kayll’s attack on the East India trade.’* Human sacrifice and counting (and accounting) are, then, interacting subjects of this book. Even in Greek tragedy counting denotes a culture of order that the use of human sacrifice may destroy. In Euripides ...”

“... wanted to be an artist, too, but when Peggy Guggenheim exhibited Gypsy’s work at her gallery, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko were offended by the company and sought other representation. But of course stripping also sold books: ‘The constant references to stripping in relationship to her writing or artwork frustrated her, but she refused to recognise ...”

“... to infect them. Southall’s worries about the role of ships in transporting bedbugs persisted. Robert Usinger, the author of the monumental Monograph of Cimicidae (the family to which the bedbug belongs), saw a thriving colony of the tropical bedbug, Cimex hemipterus, on a liner sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco. But local transport is just as much ...”

“... aided by Kennedy holdovers – among them, the enormously influential secretary of defence, Robert McNamara. By 1968, with more than half a million American troops stationed in the former French colony of Indochina, his massive military expenditure began to starve his Great Society. And second, although he presided over imperial America’s South-East ...”

“... as well as the subject – an approach she shares with the new breed of nature writers, such as Robert Macfarlane and Helen MacDonald, whose propensity for walking allows plenty of space for associative thinking and oblique connections. It also reflects habits of thought of which hyperlinking and googling are part. Sometimes, as in the work of Iain Sinclair ...”

“... were. In December 1763, Wilkes himself was awarded £1000 against the undersecretary of state, Robert Wood, for trespass to his house and papers; and much later, in 1769, he secured judgment for four times that sum against Lord Halifax personally for trespass and false imprisonment. In neither case did the defendant’s counsel try to argue that office as ...”

“... of the gendering of fantasies of remote control. In an 1892 article on female circumcision, Dr Robert Morris declared that ‘the clitoris is a little electric button which, pressed by adhesions, rings up the whole nervous system.’ Dr Morris’s intervention provoked some panicky speculation as to the way that amount of pleasure might be brought speedily ...”