“... induces a quasi-philosophic calm. The French term ‘nature morte’ (the first use recorded in Robert is from 1752) and the English ‘still life’ (which was being used at the end of the 17th century) have different connotations despite being derived from the same Dutch word – stilleven. On the one hand, autumnal abundance, the fruits of the ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... of an Idea, C.B. Macpherson’s more incautious The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Robert Nozick’s notorious Anarchy, State and Utopia and Lawrence Becker’s modest text on Property Rights. But none of these has made a concerted attempt to think through the ways in which property rights have been conceived in modern history and to draw a set ...”

“... volumes of the English version. It was Keene who first discovered Konishi, making him known to Robert Brower and myself when Keene wrote Brower that Konishi’s Nihon Bungakushi was by all odds the best going. We got the book, and in due course Konishi arrived to spend 15 months at Stanford (when Sir George Sansom was writing his history of Japan ...”

“... strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic poet (she published under the name ‘Speranza’) and was closely associated with the Fenian Movement. In 1882, Wilde told a lecture audience in San ...”

“... a past as a psychopathic bandit leader, ‘Satan Joao’, and a sudden repentance to match that of Robert the Devil in the old story which has been his favourite as a child (a story, like ‘St Julien l’Hospitalier’, full of the melodramatic and possibly not spurious appeal of its provision for saving discontinuities, abrupt redemptions in damned ...”

“... servants framed, implemented and ran them. Late in the administration of Lindsay’s predecessor Robert Wagner, there had been some notably unsuccessful efforts at incorporating community participation in anti-poverty programmes. Lindsay, and his young mayoral aides, all newcomers to the day-to-day management of City affairs, were committed to active ...”

“... of that date of 1978 makes one wonder how the editor could have missed the official role of Sir Robert Wroth in the Parliament of 1604 (I,38) when all was explained by Dr Nicholas Tyacke in 1977. The Neale-Notestein ‘paradigm’ – the story of a powerful and independent House of Commons – broods over these volumes, emphasising that they belong to eras ...”

“... and sexuality, we can now make out a whole army of allies. Sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris or Richard Dawkins represent the more overtly reductionist end of this force. Eysenck is often ready to associate himself with such work: significantly, he often does so in precisely the publicist and popular contexts that Desmond ...”

“... of people who did ‘some not wholly fulfilling thing’ – Cuchulain fighting the waves, Robert Gregory taking to the air – their fulfilment to be achieved only when Yeats had emblematised them in strong verse. Seven: Dublin is a capital city in which ‘eight decades’ experience of the telephone has not yet fostered the habit of returning ...”

“... Textbook writers set examinations. The rationale is clear, the interest transparent. In what in the United States is called ‘behavioural science’, such people have a standard first chapter and a standard first question. What is behavioural science the science of? In BS101, the standard first course, some more or less elaborate padding with examples of the answer ‘just that, behaviour’ will do ...”

“... this is to make the reader an eavesdropper on architects at work and aristocrats at play. We meet Robert Adam giving 26 Grosvenor Square its magnificent 18th-century interiors; J.T. Wimperis concocting his splendid fin-de-siècle Queen Anne extravaganzas for the rebuilding of Mount Street; Edwin Lutyens having fun and games over the designs for the new ...”

“... relation between reason and unreason in this area. A recent and distinguished contribution is Robert Parker’s essay on pollution and purification, Miasma. One main feature of this research has been its invocation of comparative anthropology and sociology: not only ancient texts and remains but also the findings of modern fieldworkers have been adduced ...”

“... in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more ...”

“... Captain acted with such civility that he became Darwin’s ‘beau ideal’ before they left port. Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon and ipso facto naturalist, was so put out by the social preference and hindrance to his own efforts to collect that he quit in Rio and shipped home. (The tradesman-status of naval surgeons in the 1830s was notorious.) It was ...”