“... the benefit of ten minutes’ chat with the Führer and was able to share his enthusiasm for the Robert Donat comedy The Ghost Goes West. It was all very genial, even if in a social sense not quite what the milord and his family were used to. Lady Mairi, who still lives in Mount Stewart, told Kershaw that Himmler had reminded her of a ‘shop-walker at ...”

“... of villages near their cottage at Cowslip Green in Somerset, following the well-known examples of Robert Raikes in Gloucestershire and Sarah Trimmer in Brentford. Patty kept a journal of the years 1789-99, published as Mendip Annals in 1859 and clearly intended for general edification. According to Patty, God (‘Providence’) started it all by sending the ...”

“... heavy pressure to do so. Metroland’s chief thruster was the railway company’s general manager, Robert Hope Selbie. His task, in Jackson’s words, was to see those unspoiled arcadias ‘comfortably populated, preferably with a high percentage of first-class season ticket-holders and their families. And if in making that possible the scenery should become ...”

“... Max, Braveheart and Patriot all in one. It is this ‘moral value’ of redemptive violence that Robert Gober evoked in his recent installation at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. As usual with Gober, the exhibit was a broken allegory that both elicited and resisted interpretation. It opened with two stacked garbage cans in plaster covered by a sheet ...”

“... write any poems until the autumn of 1914. Thinking over their genesis afterwards, his friend Robert Frost commented that ‘the decision he made in going into the army helped him make the other decision in form.’ This is both a simple material explanation and perhaps also a piece of soul-searching. Frost knew that the more Thomas believed he could ...”

“... bands. One of the earliest was the Cyfarthfa band, in the iron-smelting centre of Merthyr Tydfil. Robert Crawshay, the owner of the Cyfarthfa works, in effect created a private orchestra. He employed a family of musicians from Bradford, members of London theatre orchestras and strolling players; and, like some Renaissance prince or 17th-century cardinal, gave ...”

“... society beauty Frances Howard, who wanted to divorce her husband and marry James I’s favourite Robert Carr, and apparently procured the death by poison of Carr’s friend Sir Thomas Overbury, who was against the marriage. Howard had consulted Forman about the fulfilment of her passion, and her confidante Mrs Anne Turner, who was supposed to have got hold ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”