“... of insisting that their honour remained untainted. His book can be read in conjunction with Robert Moeller’s War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, which explores these themes with imagination.* The myth of the Wehrmacht’s ‘clean hands’ took hold in these years, and – witness the heated debates over the ...”

“... by his widow with the customary bottle of champagne and went into service as a pleasure cruiser in Robert Ley’s Strength through Joy organisation, which provided ‘classless’ holidays for (some) members of the Volksgemeinschaft, subsidised by money seized from the trade unions. In the remaining years of peace it cruised the Mediterranean and the Norwegian ...”

“... robbers and even on their stout bearing on the gallows. In late Elizabethan years the Jesuit Robert Parsons conjectured that there was more highway robbery in England than probably anywhere in the world. The miscreants ‘were sometimes of no base Condition, or Quality . . . but rather Gentlemen, or wealthy Men’s Sons, moved thereunto not so much of ...”

“... looms large in Bourgeois’s vision of herself. In the well-known photograph of the artist by Robert Mapplethorpe, best understood as a collaborative effort, she is portrayed wearing a favourite monkey-skin coat and carrying what appears to be a large sculptured phallus under her arm. ‘I counted on what I brought: namely, the coat and the ...”

“... was getting started, to a Yorkshire collector, Henry Savile, and then to the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, whose books came mostly from the dissolution of the monasteries. The Cottonian library also contained the sole extant copy of Beowulf, which in 1731 narrowly escaped destruction in a serious fire. After a spell in the Bodleian the collection ...”

“... And so on 22 December the contract bidding was suspended; the administration, the columnist Robert Novak suggested, was actively considering lifting the ban against these three countries. When the bidding restarts (probably in March), the winners are expected to hire hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to work on 2311 construction projects that are to be ...”

“... that the area had been staked out). This complicated phone trail eventually led to a man called Robert Lady. Lady was the CIA’s man in Milan, formally a US vice-consul, but well known to the police as a spy. He was so in love with Italy that he had decided to spend his imminent retirement in a luxurious villa near Turin. When this house was raided by the ...”

“... on the island and three-quarters of its adult males were or had been convicts.) Thanks largely to Robert Hughes’s Fatal Shore (1987), Tasmania is thought of as a convict hell: a place of ferocious floggings and inhuman confinement. So it would become, but only after the transformations in its economy and polity deliberately effected by that second wave of ...”

“... Robert Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit. Quotations from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945: ‘Suppose a thousand suns should rise together into the sky: such is the glory of the Shape of the Infinite God.’ Reading that same chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Darjeeling in 1962, Allen Ginsberg thought of something else: the coloured wheels of psilocybin-induced visions ...”

“... without ethnic or geographic cohesion are ideological libertarians. Wisconsin was the home of Robert La Follette Sr, the Senate’s greatest progressive, and of Joseph McCarthy, its most infamous reactionary. It has voted for Democratic presidential candidates in every election since 1988. But off-year elections with low voter turnout – and ...”

“... and small-minded way seems inconceivable. The circumstances were not like those in which Robert Rauschenberg, in a neo-Dadaist gesture, erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning. And is Borgherini likely to have simply thrown away a painting by Sarto, a leading painter, who was at the time providing pictures for his bedroom in Florence? Underneath the ...”

“... A young god​ sits astride a bull. It has been forced to its knees and its head has been pulled back so the god can hold a dagger to its throat, or to its neck, or its shoulder. In some versions he has already plunged the dagger in and drops of blood have begun to fall to the ground. The god wears a billowing cloak and a distinctive bonnet. Other animals have come to help him in his attack on the bull ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... state of domesticity, as well as of other forms of confinement. She can sometimes sound very like Robert Burns (both of them wrote poems about mice as the victims of human beings; hers, however, is entirely in the mouse’s voice). Low-roofed cots, cells, shells and alcoves; the caterpillar’s fold of silken web; the human womb: these cramped spaces are ...”

“... recalled that in the summer of 1955 he wrote a lecture on Yeats’s poem ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, which, as he liked to put it 26 years later, ‘turned almost spontaneously into a book’, namely, Romantic Image. The book does have the assured, focused quality of an argument that writes itself, which may obscure what a bold move it ...”