“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... supposedly irked that Kennedy had failed to provide air cover at the Bay of Pigs or angry that Robert Kennedy was targeting them, figured prominently. Now that Castro’s epic reign is coming to an end, without any help from the US, perhaps the Americans, and the mobsters, will make a return to the ...”

“... Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sense. There isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus in Victorian literature ...”

“... sits near my desk as a permanent challenge, like the Pandora’s box opened at the end of the Robert Aldrich film Kiss Me Deadly. A casket that contains the sound of apocalypse, blinding enlightenment, hurt. Dilworth’s boxes fold death in a tender embrace: we have only his word for the rituals that have been observed. And he’s not telling. There is a ...”

“... national contexts at all, and misses some of the best French material altogether (such as Robert Martin Lesuire’s corrosively funny 1760 novel Les Sauvages de l’Europe, a virtual catalogue of anti-English stereotypes). And without contextualisation, the observers, like the observed, blend together into a homogeneous mass. This problem undermines ...”

“... the same structure, and fills in the blanks. In 1973, writing of Central Park, the land artist Robert Smithson described as ‘dialectical landscapes’ those areas that will not fit easily the categories of urban, rural, cultivated or natural. Defiant Gardens concludes with a consideration of what we might call the dialectical garden. In cities across ...”

“... or living-rooms. Many, like David McQuillan, Winston McCaughey, Ritchie Latimer, Albert Beacom, Robert Bennett, Thomas Loughran and James McFall were with their children when they were attacked. William Gordon’s 10-year-old-daughter, Lesley, and seven-year-old son, Richard, were beside him in the family car when an IRA booby-trap bomb exploded. He and ...”

“... because he looks on life with a dead glance and can see only dead souls around him? Belinsky, Robert Jackson wrote in Dialogues with Dostoevsky, ‘well understood that Gogol’s mirror was crooked. But Russian reality, Russian man, in Belinsky’s view, was in the profoundest sense unformed, grotesque, disfigured.’ Ma perceives his characters and their ...”

“... reads: ‘According to Jo’s diary Hopper suffers from depression and frequently reads poems of Robert Frost.’ The audio tour claims that Two Comedians (1966), Hopper’s last canvas, is ‘unusually autobiographical’ and demonstrates ‘the extent to which Hopper’s work was a collaborative process with his wife as model, muse and ...”

“... 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 ...”