“... 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 ...”

“... got it right: she had seen it all before under the microscope.In​ 1827, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown undertook an investigation into the pollen of Clarkia pulchella, a straggly plant with slender pale purple petals that splay out like chicken feet. Placing the pollen grains in water, he saw through the microscope that they were ‘very evidently in ...”

“... persuaded post-war Conservatives that – in the adaptive and ameliorist tradition of Sir Robert Peel – they should accept the (apparently irreversible) political realities of Keynsian economics, public ownership and the welfare state. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the early Fifties he continued the policies of fiscal management and full ...”

“... good or ill crops up again: the recumbent wife’s blue-cotton gloves, the allusion to dead uncle Robert, who once posthumously materialised in a bus queue at Hendon, and later in the winter garden. The winter garden of Russia is the scene of a good deal of materialisation. Ashburner loses his suitcase but it turns up, interfered with; Nina disappears more or ...”

“... of the industry. Another part of his defence, which he has repeated in interviews, was that Robert Newland, Jopling’s former strategist, had joined his operation in 2016 and turned it criminal. US government investigators found spreadsheets detailing all the oversold artworks, with the hapless investors clearly marked, along with a note reading ‘How ...”

“... every weekend and becomes an urban beach.The story of the M8 starts with the Bruce Report in 1945 (Robert Bruce was Glasgow’s chief engineer). It is remembered for two startling proposals: first, the destruction of almost all of the city centre and its architecturally significant buildings, including the School of Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Mitchell ...”

“... or requests had to be written or typed on the correct blank form.In Good-Bye to All That (1929), Robert Graves complained about the ‘army forms marked “Urgent”’ which ‘constantly arrived from headquarters’ and were ‘all contradictory’. These forms were prefixed ‘AF’ and indexed with a number and a ‘class’ letter, which in 1917 ran ...”

“... of independence from political control. Unlike Trump, who tried to fire the former special counsel Robert Mueller, Biden has made no attempt to breach this norm. Federal convictions differ from state convictions in one further, striking way: as Debs learned, federal convicts can be pardoned by the president, while state prisoners can be pardoned only though a ...”

“... Robert Hughes​ has a great enthusiasm for Goya’s art, which he communicates in this biography, together with much useful information, forcefully expressed, about the rival factions at the Bourbon court, the Napoleonic invasion, the evolution of bull-fighting, what a maja was, what guerrillas were. This is mixed with some less useful observations – there were in those days priests who ‘groped boys’ and were ‘quite as bad’ as their modern counterparts – and some errors, as when Hughes claims that the curls of pubic hair in the Naked Maja are certainly the earliest in Western art ...”