“... again.At a particularly stormy meeting of Tory backbenchers after Kwarteng’s tax-cutting budget, Robert Halfon accused Truss to her face of ‘trashing the last ten years of blue-collar conservatism’ by allowing her chancellor to scrap the top rate of tax and the cap on bankers’ bonuses. This missed the point. Cameron-Osborne were never blue-collar ...”

“... It offered the vacant throne to William and Mary. What if James returned? Isaac Newton consulted Robert Sawyer, the distinguished lawyer who, with him, represented Cambridge University in the Convention, and received the reassuring advice that to oppose a de facto king, even if on behalf of a lawful king, was treason. But James’s attempt to regain his ...”

“... the most cosmopolitan writers of the time: one thinks of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Robert Louis Stevenson. Every single great idea that fuelled the driving force of the 19th century – freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also the subcurrents of history uncovered by contemporaries, such as the libido, the unconscious and the uncanny ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... have no idea what it contains. In the 17th century, it was in the possession of the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly ...”

“... in Manama in 2011. The crackdown began in earnest two days after the US secretary of defence, Robert Gates, had visited the country. Saudi and Emirati security forces crossed into Bahrain over the King Fahd causeway in British-made Tacticas armoured personnel carriers to support Bahrain’s security apparatus. As Wearing argues, ‘Britain could choose to ...”

“... health’ products and vitamins. The anti-vax doctor Mark Geier, quoted extensively by Robert F. Kennedy Jr in his infamous Rolling Stone article, marketed bogus autism treatments, including chelation therapy, which draws metals from the bloodstream (Geier was stripped of his medical licence in 2011). Another widely promoted autism ‘cure’ for ...”

“... writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a fellow craftsman’s appreciativeness when he observed of Auden’s multifarious prose: ‘Much hard, ingenious, correct toil has gone into inconspicuous things: introductions, anthologies and translations. When one looks at them ...”

“... been the glory of classical art – was one of the big issues of those days, and the artist-critic Robert Smithson had great fun with Fried’s finding that certain polychrome sculptures by the painter Jules Olitski consisted of surfaces that had the miraculous property of being ‘flat, but rolled’. Speaking of the American painters he championed in the ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... best known as the uncle of the man who cheated in the quiz show that was made into a film by Robert Redford (in Quiz Show Carl van Doren is played with magnificent stateliness by Paul Scofield). The book is straightforward narrative history, but it takes its curious title from the fact that it was written at the birth of the United Nations, on whose ...”

“... was always a confounding issue. As early as 1971, experienced anthropologists such as Robert Fox and Zeus Salazar had observed that since the group’s nearest neighbours were barely two and a half miles away it was only reasonable to suppose they must have been having regular outside contact. Others seemed to have a vested interest in proving the ...”

“... presented to King Louis-Philippe at the Château St-Cloud in 1846 by the renowned French magician Robert-Houdin. An account can be found in his Memoirs: I borrowed from my noble spectators several handkerchiefs which I made into a parcel and laid on the table. Then at my request different persons wrote on the cards the names of the places whither they ...”

“... and cosy corner-shop atmosphere: exterminate and replace them. The mastermind behind Crown was Robert Haft, a Harvard Business School graduate who had written his master’s thesis on retail discounting. Crown’s philosophy, as displayed on South Lake, was predatory. Find an existing profitable outlet, set up alongside it, discount the neighbour into ...”

“... unionists. Nevertheless, some revisionist historians have recently shown that William Wallace and Robert Bruce, icons of Scotland’s War of Independence against England in the late 13th and early 14th century, became unionist heroes in 19th-century Scottish culture. Without Wallace and Bruce, so Victorian Scots argued, Scotland would have been conquered by ...”