“... conducted by the Jesuits in the Italian countryside were religious versions of carnival (just as Robert Burns, describing revivalist religion in 18th-century Ayrshire, wrote of ‘holy fairs’), and the missioners enjoyed the status of modern pop stars. But the more distant missions taken to the Americas and Asia were fatally compromised by the ‘European ...”

“... at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live’. One ...”

“... More recently, the case has attracted attention from historians of illicit literature such as Robert Darnton, interested in explaining the success of Thérèse philosophe, and from historians of medicine fascinated by Cadière’s visions and trances. An article on it even appeared in the journal Epilepsy and Behaviour. Scientists, ignoring the long ...”

“... Jung ascribed to Hitler, is probably worse, and probably less probable. For those familiar with Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the question is whether we’re in the hands of the existential-fool murderer Moosbrugger or the supercilious and beguiling industrialist Arnheim. But why choose? We should consider the possibility that Trump and his ...”

“... code – takes us deep into one of the major subjects of the novel, the difficulty of learning, as Robert Lowell’s title says, ‘to speak of woe that is in marriage’. When Ralph sees what has happened to his cousin Isabel’s grand ambitions for a rich, free life, we are told that he ‘woefully’ exclaims to himself how far she has fallen. In a discreet ...”

“... increasing supply; Joshua Gilpin introduced its use in the US in 1804. And in Paris Nicolas-Louis Robert invented a papermaking machine which, through the use of a conveyor belt, produced not single sheets but a continuous roll: the belt replicated the actions of the vatman and coucher, even the right to left, forward and back shake to distribute the ...”

“... popular literature took account of various stress disorders. Even before the wars, in books like Robert Burton’s bestselling Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), there was an awareness that ‘the simple narration many times’ of traumatic stories could help bring meaning to confusion and offer control to the sufferer. But in an age of Christian, neo-Stoic ...”

“... a triable indictment. The phrase had been copied by Wilson from a note by his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, who was against the whole idea of a trial, and was endorsed with minimal discussion by the three other members of the council. Wilson was well content. He had even managed to replace ‘principles’, in a phrase in the third paragraph of Article ...”

“... of his ‘experimental geography’ draws on the precedent of the ‘site-nonsite’ artwork of Robert Smithson in order to respond to Fredric Jameson’s call for a ‘cognitive mapping’ of advanced capitalism. In the process Paglen also suggests a model of photography that turns the influential account of Roland Barthes on its head: rather than the ...”

“... and precocious Mary Ward, later better known as Mrs Humphry Ward, author of the hugely successful Robert Elsmere (1888). Through the good offices of her uncle, Matthew Arnold, she met Renan in Paris, and thanks to the patronage of John Morley she reviewed his autobiography in Macmillan’s Magazine. Renan’s conception of the ethical character of Jesus ...”

“... a very strange scene in which an Amisian femme fatale sets out to turn Larkin on at a party in Robert Conquest’s flat. The femme fatale is called Phoebe Phelps. She’s presented as a slightly older woman for whom Amis had a troubling sexual passion between 1976 and 1980, which would make her a – perhaps the – model for Nicola Six in London Fields ...”

“... before him. The impact of these paintings on the history of cinema is hard to overstate. Valentine Robert calls them ‘protocinematic’ in their continuous temporal flow and shifting points of view; her catalogue essay traces the many filmmakers who have used their almost documentary detail like a storyboard. Besides the Americans, these include Alice ...”

“... He replaced the glorious monsters of his early days at the club – Vieira, Petit, Sol Campbell, Robert Pirès, Freddie Ljungberg, the otherworldly Thierry Henry – with endless tiny midfielders and not very good defenders. From 2006 until 2015, he actively refused to buy a goalkeeper. He seemed wilfully blind to the massive hole in the midfield that ...”

“... scheming protagonist ventures along it in search of the room occupied by her husband’s nephew, Robert, who is hot on her (bigamous) trail. ‘She stopped and looked at the number on the door. The key was in the lock, and her hand dropped upon it as if unconsciously.’ She stands for a few moments trembling, ‘then a horrible expression came over her ...”

“... work is universally described as the crown of all the works of the master’. By the time of Robert Stevenson’s Spanish Cathedral Music of the Golden Age (1961), ‘the master’ had become ‘a great genius’. Evidence of actual performances also began to increase, particularly in France, where Charles Bordes, basing his edition on Haberl’s and ...”