“... difficulties.As I was reading these letters I also happened to be reading a fine new study by Robert Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the 18th Century.* The book traces the history of the concept of moral beauty from Plato and Plotinus, through Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and into Kant, Schiller and Goethe. Norton explores the way this ...”

“... versions: ‘A good many began singing. Spirits rose. Glasses were brought out and filled’ (Robert Baldick, 1964); ‘Many sang songs. They were jolly together. They offered one another a drop to drink’ (Helen Constantine, 2016); ‘Many sang. Spirits rose, and glasses were produced and filled’ (Anthony Goldsmith, 1947); ‘There was singing and ...”

“... English political nation a great deal, but in 1603 the skilful diplomacy of her chief minister, Robert Cecil, escorted James VI, King of Scots, to the thrones of England and Ireland, with far less fuss than everyone had feared. The entire archipelago was for the first time in its history united under a single monarch, and moreover under the ruler of the ...”

“... finding somewhere on the South Island a bit like ‘the Lake District’. The man who catches her, Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire and former CEO of a drone manufacturer, shuttles between disguises of his own: doomsday prepper, wannabe media baron, and, on occasion, an imaginary commanding officer at the CIA’s Special Operations Group called Lt Col ...”

“... in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), and then, after the Brexit referendum in 2016, by what Robert Crowcroft describes as a ‘contest’, ostensibly between proponents of popular and parliamentary sovereignty, ‘to make up the rules under which the country was governed’, though in truth the constitution provided ‘little more than a fig leaf’ for ...”

“... writes as pungently as anyone in modern journalism, but he has a weekly column to sustain, and Robert Maxwell is by no means as anxious about the fate of the Belgrano as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in ...”

“... insists that he and his colleagues ‘always did love … a cinema that is haunted by writing’. Robert Bresson said much the same thing: ‘Cinema is not a spectacle. It’s a kind of writing.’ There is a wonderful, casual-seeming evocation of this thought in Daney’s essay from 1969 on Pasolini’s Teorema. He says we know what the desert at the end of ...”

“... a public museum, so Helen took inspiration from an example encountered in London: the library of Robert Witt, whose collection of photographs of paintings would later become the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute. For the FARL, Helen commissioned photographers to document objects in churches, private collections and other obscure places throughout ...”

“... 130 survived the journey.‘What is modern about him primarily is, if you wish, his anxiety,’ Robert Hughes later said of Arikha’s work. ‘His desire to pull something out of the flux of what is not known, and give it some kind of temporally stable form … Some of it is very risky stuff. This comes out particularly in the drawings.’ Arikha’s ...”

“... country’s high-profile assassinations: Pio Gama Pinto (1965), Mboya (1969), J.M. Kariuki (1975), Robert Ouko (1990) and Odhiambo Mbai (2003). In 1982, the Moi regime (which lasted from 1978 to 2002) arrested him for alleged involvement in a coup attempt. He spent six years in detention, during which he was tortured. After his release, he became the leading ...”

“... background, and although Herbert Howarth wrote well about it in Some Figures behind T.S. Eliot, Robert Crawford has made a substantial addition. His patient Oxford D.Phil. thesis is intended more generally to illustrate Eliot’s preoccupation with the primitive and the city, but its opening chapters are about St Louis and the Mississippi. He illustrates ...”

“... Journal seem to hate Clinton so much. Having supported free trade, installed Goldman Sachs’s Robert Rubin to preside over the American economy, and retained and deferred to Alan Greenspan, Clinton has obviously been a good President for the business community. Indeed, he’s been so pro-business that he could not be successfully attacked by Republicans ...”

“... A favourite poem of mine has always been Eileen Myles’s divinely boorish ‘On the Death of Robert Lowell’: O, I don’t give a shit. He was an old white-haired man Insensate beyond belief and Filled with much anxiety about his imagined Pain. Not that I’d know I hate fucking wasps. The guy was a loon. Signed up for Spring Semester at MacLeans A ...”

“... the impossible. Bear in mind that even in this group there are sharp differences in ability. As Robert X. Cringely, a (pseudonymous) commentator on the computer business who in 1991 published Accidental Empires, the first and still the best book on the growth of the industry, explains: at the extreme edge of the normal distribution, there are programmers ...”

“... In one of several imagined conversations between the big players in the globalised world, he has Robert Rubin, the former US Treasury Secretary, address the Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad, after the latter had used the World Bank meeting in Hong Kong to denounce the evils of globalisation, comparing the global economy to a jungle full of ...”