“... media than in the hierarchy between them. Gauguin called the ear ‘inferior to the eye’, and Robert Delaunay confessed, in a letter to Franz Marc, that he was ‘horrified by music and noise’ and mistrusted ‘auditory perception’. August Endell, an architect associated with the Jugendstil movement, believed that no visual art had yet succeeded in ...”

“... in return. But so-called ‘reciprocal altruism’ isn’t authentically unselfish (as admitted by Robert Trivers, who coined the phrase) if the anticipated benefit is greater than the immediate cost. It’s therefore just as well for us all that altruism takes other forms too. People often bear costs not only in reproductive fitness but in material ...”

“... two extra hours of Downton-free life. This latest crop of period narratives probably began with Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park (2001): at best, a mildly amusing self-conscious pastiche, though it wasn’t clear why a film-maker who could produce Nashville and Short Cuts would bother. The writer credited with Gosford Park was the now ennobled Julian ...”

“... soup cans (‘Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day’), asked Robert Indiana if Pop was ‘easy art’ (‘Yes’), and sought Jim Dine’s views on whether Pop offers social commentary (‘I’m certainly not changing the world … if it’s art, who cares if it’s a comment?’). He also asked Lichtenstein: ‘Is Pop art ...”

“... without being deeply political. He published a book on Boswell and took to the Himalayas a copy of Robert Bridges’s wartime poetry anthology, The Spirit of Man. He was a brilliant but arguably reckless climber, personally responsible for seven Sherpa deaths in 1922, while making a run at the summit against all prudent advice. His failure to provision Camp ...”

“... explorers or scientific investigators; or slumming journalists (James Greenwood, Jack London, Robert Sherard and, later, Orwell) trying to share an experience that they could never penetrate because they knew they could always escape. And there was Dickens, who lived in denial about his childhood labour in a blacking factory and displaced his trauma onto ...”

“... the British reoccupied the East India Company’s settlement in Calcutta. In June a force led by Robert Clive deposed Siraj after defeating him in a battle near Plassey (Palashi), helped by the defection of the nawab’s key advisers and financial backers to the British side. The first account of the ‘Black Hole’ – as the room where the soldiers were ...”

“... a plump silvered bladder in a house of cardboard. It’s possible to combine both approaches. Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe (1994), for example, takes its subject seriously (she was a homespun mystic, to put it politely, who in the 1430s wrote the first autobiography in English), making recurrent efforts to re-create her world: ‘She sat with ...”

“... self-dismemberment?) What she wants now is to become a hybrid of Flip and the land artist Robert Smithson, who made his mark on Utah’s topography with his immense coiling earthwork, Spiral Jetty. As Reno explains to her New York boyfriend, Sandro Valera (an older, successful minimalist artist and heir to the Valera motorcycle and tyre fortune), the ...”

“... commentators felt there were simply too many books: ‘a vast Chaos and confusion’, according to Robert Burton. ‘The longest life of a man,’ John Cotgrave lamented, ‘is not sufficient to explore so much as the substance of them, which (in many) is but slender.’ Thus careful reading was figured as a kind of profitable destruction: an act of ...”

“... with Greece and Rome: think of movies like Gladiator and 300, as well as the success of Robert Harris’s Pompeii and his Cicero trilogy. It’s true that antiquity has recently been very good box-office, but preposterous to suggest that this is something new. Any history of film or fiction shows that there has been a passion for the ancient world ...”

“... The ground was prepared by an authoritative report commissioned by Princeton’s president, Robert Goheen, and drafted by Gardner Patterson, an economist at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both men’s political instincts and diplomatic skills were tested to the limit when the report reached sceptical alumni, whose ...”

“... of petitioners’ threats to burn down this person’s house or shoot that man. In East Yorkshire, Robert Sharp had a stone thrown at him by a female pauper who had been ‘stopped in her pay’. The poor, King insists, were not ‘other’: they belonged. Even after 1800 they ‘remained fellow creatures’ inside a social order that gave them a degree of ...”

“... die Toten’ – ‘Blessed are the dead’), and the intensely plangent five-part Lamentations of Robert White, who died of plague in 1574, at the age of 36, along with his entire family.9 March. Europe is closing down. Flights are being cancelled. Two LRB editors have plans to go to New York, where the situation is just beginning to kick off. Sam decides to ...”

“... are of course novels about Jesus – in fact, Burgess wrote one of them, Man of Nazareth – and Robert Graves did Milton as well as Jesus and Claudius. Doubtless there are many more such biographical novels, forgotten or unread by me. They don’t seem very popular, though there was Lloyd Douglas’s bestselling The Robe, which amazed the experienced Edmund ...”