“... and people’s local interests in order to make a lot of money’. Other protesters appealed to Robert Runcie, whose pronouncements about the reckless pursuit of profit in the inner cities had so annoyed Mrs Thatcher. Runcie concluded that the Ashford development was ‘the price we have to pay for economic expansion’. The good Christians and Tories of ...”

“... it for thirty years and who thought he was worth an OM. Among his friends were T.E. Lawrence and Robert Graves. He had the patriarchal scholar’s satisfaction of receiving a festschrift, organised by Sir Michael Howard, but never achieved the university distinction his attainments probably merited. When in 1946 Swinton at last relinquished what Danchev ...”

“... to this history of ambivalence, in 1883 Beddoes’s entire oeuvre ended up in the care of Robert Browning. Browning had expressed to Kelsall, Beddoes’s executor, his admiration for the poet, and Kelsall, hoping that Browning’s influence might help in establishing Beddoes’s reputation, bequeathed the Beddoes papers to him. What became known as ...”

“... yet consigned to the skip two excellent earlier Lives, A.N. Wilson’s Hilaire Belloc (1984) and Robert Speaight’s The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957). If a debunker were needed for this wittily bellicose (‘Bellocose’, Wilson suggests) Catholic author of more than 150 publications (which smacks of thraldom to the work ethic some call the Protestant ...”

“... was able to leave the vast sum of £25,000 to Susannah, who very soon married Erasmus’s son Robert. And when the son of this union, Charles, married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, another of Josiah’s grandchildren, she brought a lavish dowry of £5000 and an annual allowance of £400. Darwin later joked that his family were ‘the degenerate descendants 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hierarchy. Responding to the heterodox Essay on Spirit (1750) by the controversial Irish bishop Robert Clayton, William Warburton, a future bishop of Gloucester, made clear his attitude towards this offshore reservation: ‘The Bishop of Clogher, or some such heathenish name, in Ireland, has just published a book. It is made up out of the rubbish of old ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the 1950s, and the consequent destruction of the borough. Directed by the infamous city planner Robert Moses, the Cross-Bronx Expressway cut through a dozen densely populated neighbourhoods, and around 60,000 people lost their homes, including Berman. He was appalled by the destruction, but because the idea of progress was so deeply rooted in his and the ...”

“... for a response, but there was none. Carver’s British reception has taken a little time. The Robert Altman movie Short Cuts, of 1993, based on nine stories and a poem of Carver’s, helped to get him wider notice. Among the stories incorporated in the film were ‘A Small, Good Thing’ – the one about the bereaved couple and the exigent baker – and ...”

“... Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s biographer, has composed it in association with the lepidopterist Robert Pyle; the translations from Russian are by Dmitri Nabokov. Nonetheless, doubt rises early. We are immediately confronted by Philippe Halsman’s photograph of the most-famous-butterfly-hunter-in-the-world ready to swipe, the gaze for once directed straight ...”

“... The emphasis being steadily on the Incarnation, the mortal nature of the child is always relevant. Robert Campin’s The Virgin and Child in an Interior, of about 1430, fills what may look to us like a simple idea with recondite symbolisms: even the position of the child’s left hand is important, for he touches his mother’s face with a conventional ...”

“... heartland of the global American imperium. Except for Jane and Paul Bowles in Morocco, only Robert Stone and Joan Didion suggest themselves, and neither of them is associated closely with any one setting. On the whole, American writers seem convinced that the vital features of their society are most clearly discernible at its centre, even though it is ...”

“... 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 ...”