“... in a way, for the picture-postcard commentary he has always been asked to provide. There was no Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg in space, but we have Buzz: ‘Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for ...”

“... wall and Scotland. Most striking are the claims made for a settled Roman presence in the Lowlands. Robert Sibbald, geographer royal for the kingdom of Scotland under Charles II, suggested that the barrier between civilisation and barbarity was not the Picts’ Wall but Graham’s Dyke (the later turf rampart, now known as the Antonine Wall, built 100 miles ...”

“... role of soldiers is not to determine but to facilitate an outcome. Here is how Lieutenant General Robert Wagner spoke of warfare in 2004: We are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing unprecedented near real-time situational awareness, increased ...”

“... the fairy godmother or the evil queen. But no storybook crone, not even Sir Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann as the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella, or Ian McKellen camping it up as Widow Twankey, can approach the monstrosity of Baba Yaga. At the close of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, the mysterious Dr Bagay herself sprouts feathers and finds her mouth stretching ...”

“... promised to no one.’ This is so stylish you almost think you are at the movies. Joe is played by Robert Chew, a vast, creepy, cunning whale of a man. Marlo is Jamie Hector. He looks like a sleek teenager and is a master of the most minimal (but unmistakable) changes of expression. Simon says Marlo represents ‘that strange combination of self-love and ...”

“... lowest public profile. (How many spy novels can you think of that feature ‘sigint’, aside from Robert Harris’s Enigma?) Yet today it is probably the most important, and certainly the most expensive. It is housed in Cheltenham in ‘the largest building ever initiated by the British government’. The building is shaped like a doughnut, which is the ...”

“... Reform Acts, though more on ecclesiastical than political grounds. He wrote to the Times deploring Robert Peel’s plan for a reading room for working-class men and women in the Midlands. Libraries without religious books he regarded as unacceptable. When Pius IX threw open the papal prisons in a general amnesty, Newman referred to their occupants as the ...”

“... these matters is not new – she explicitly acknowledges her debts, especially to Steven Popper, Robert Lempert and Steven Bankes’s work at the Rand Corporation on what they call ‘robust adaptive planning’ – but her way of justifying it is particularly crisp and compelling. Simple cost-benefit analysis will tend to collapse a rich understanding of ...”

“... out licences, at the risk of being prosecuted as ‘pirates’. A London radio aficionado called Robert Ford began taunting the government with his illegal unlicensed radio listening. The government was initially reluctant to prosecute, but eventually his home was searched, his radio was found, and he was arrested. He insisted on being jailed, proclaiming ...”

“... Nuremberg and Tokyo trials had their critics, ranging from Hannah Arendt to the Republican Senator Robert Taft, as well as Hans Kelsen, the positivist visionary of international law, who saw them as providing not legal redress but retribution, since their competence was expressly limited to acts committed by the losing side. (It is characteristic of ...”

“... Britons, a species Banville loves to scrutinise. And Banville has always written well about drink. Robert B. Parker, the last novelist to try on Chandler’s shoes, was a three-books-a-year man – his main hero was a private eye called Spenser – who’d done a PhD on hardboiled literature. His first effort, Poodle Springs (1989), was hampered by a set-up ...”

“... of Mackintosh came with the publication in 1968 of a study by the Canadian-born architect Robert Macleod, who concluded that he was ‘a last and remote efflorescence of a vital British tradition which reached back to Pugin … With his pursuit of the “modern”, his love of the old, and his obsessive individuality, he was one of the last and one of ...”

“... and strait-laced brother Walter. He now immersed himself in British and American literature: Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville, above all Kipling. He became the leading figure in a bohemian gang who wrote and sang songs together, drank, chased girls and shocked respectable burghers. He narrowly avoided being expelled from school: a teacher argued in his ...”

“... meet, rather than people. In white-collar epics from King Vidor’s seminal The Crowd through Robert Wise’s highly inventive Executive Suite and the exuberant Jerry Lewis vehicle The Errand Boy to The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coen brothers’ screwball version of Frank Capra, what separates the upper floors from the lower is access to information. The ...”

“... attitude to their fine furniture and irreproachable outfits; excessive patricianness also leads to Robert Lowell-style manic episodes and nasty yachting accidents. Third place goes to Boris by virtue of Russian soulfulness. Second goes to Theo’s mother, a scrappy woman from Kansas who funded an advanced degree in art history by working as a fashion model on ...”