“... could never have written anything as unpleasant as that. But he could have been the target of Robert Browning’s jibe (in ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’) about ‘that dear middle-age these noodles praise’, when, ‘you’ll say, once all believed,’ from Henry VIII to the ploughman with his paternoster. So it was not a book above and beyond ...”

“... like some of the sources used by orthodox contemporary histories of the Transportation System. Robert Hughes’s discussion of the Port Arthur penal colony could almost be a description of Jorgensen’s chronicle – although Hughes’s tone, predictably, is rather less admiring than Gould’s: To scrutinise the punishment records . . . is to look into a ...”

“... it to keep his pills in, it’s as if he were getting stripped for action, or being barbered like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver. (It’s also a sumptuous image of death, rather ahead of Dalí.) I want, if I can, to avoid saying what happens then: suffice it to say, it is cleverly spun out, attended by false alarms and dry runs (‘a majestic police constable ...”

“... the usual upright, and excruciatingly painful, position. One of the most memorable passages in Robert Harris’s new novel, Imperium, describes the famous crucifixion of the six thousand slave comrades of the rebel Spartacus, who had been rounded up by the Romans in 71 BC. Harris imagines the victorious Roman general, Crassus, carefully choreographing this ...”

“... Given Greenberg’s disdain for Duchamp, his distaste for Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg was predictable. But he also dismissed most other major movements of the 1960s and after: Minimal and Conceptual Art’s high-mindedness; the new art forms that focused on the body and performance; and especially the growth of politically ...”

“... visited or worked in the Loomis Laboratory included Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Robert Wood, E.O. Lawrence, George Kistiakowsky, Leo Szilárd, the Compton brothers (Arthur and Karl) and Albert Einstein. One newspaper columnist observed Loomis’s odd form of philanthropy: ‘In Tuxedo Park, his home, he has built the Loomis Laboratories, and ...”

“... hear the stress in his voice. He asked the captain to put on the battalion command sergeant-major, Robert Gallagher. A leathery faced Army Ranger of 40, Gallagher had survived the battle of Mogadishu, where he had been wounded three times. Twitty knew Gallagher would be blunt. ‘All right, sergeant-major, I want the truth,’ Twitty said. ‘Do you need ...”

“... the Greek emperor’s Varangians (by this time largely exiled Englishmen) fought the Normans under Robert Guiscard, with much the same result: early Varangian success brought to a stand by cavalry charges, followed by withering archery; no survivors. The English had weapons, but the Normans had a weapons system. Wood’s view, in short, is that the result at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the CIA at least, as readers of The Good Spy, Kai Bird’s excellent 2014 biography of Robert Ames, the CIA’s Near East director, will know. And other groups, usually associated with one of the liberal Protestant denominations, took over from the discredited AFME in advocating for Palestinian rights and questioning pro-Israel US foreign ...”

“... that she must be its real author, and that if she wasn’t then she’d finally met her match. Robert Elsmere (1888) set Mrs Humphry Ward on Eliot’s vacant throne, and ten years later The Sorrows of Satan (1895) established Marie Corelli as heir apparent. Trollope would have been provoked by Woolf’s celebrated requirement for women writers. A room of ...”

“... and post-minimalist sculptors of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra – and then with the promotion, through the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976, of a somewhat younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James ...”

“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

“... with preachers of the ‘white man’s burden’ school of belief in benevolent empire, among them Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, with their self-serving fairy tales about a post-Vietnam US internationalism organised around ‘complexity’, ‘interdependence’, ‘regime theory’ and ‘liberal institutionalism’. But his main focus is Gramsci, who as ...”

“... it was not Proust’s life I wanted to discover. I was passionately eager to know not when he met Robert de Montesquiou [one of the chief models for the Baron de Charlus], but when he met Swann, Charlus or Albertine.’ This perspective accounts for an apparent slip in his other book, where de Fallois writes of ‘three decisive events’ in Proust’s ...”