“... 14th century; the Van Eycks had forebears and colleagues involved in this production line, such as Robert Campin, who also embraced oil paint. Captivated by pictorial exports from Siena, Flemings were now keen to commission works that stood halfway between the public arrays of stone-carved saints and the little pictures in books meant for private enjoyment ...”

“... minted Liberian banknotes during his tenure as a deputy governor of the central bank. Another, Robert Sirleaf, is implicated in the collapse of the national oil company. When asked why she had appointed them, Johnson Sirleaf said it was because the country needed ‘specialised skill’.In 2018 she handed over the presidency to George Weah, a former ...”

“... became avid readers of political economy, and some of them, notably the reforming minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, also made important contributions to it. They increasingly came to see formal legal privilege as unjustifiable. They also sought to escape from the fiscal double bind through reforms that would generate reliable, taxable economic growth.At ...”

“... as depicting women’s lives (‘the best painter of women’s experiences alive today’, as Robert Hughes once called her) and just as often as ‘autobiographical’. To some extent the work invites this interpretation. She has described Nunes, the model for many of the later works, as her ‘stand-in’. The images of women ...”

“... Montaigne, Thomas Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe ...”

“... to earn the right to the luxury of practising his art’. Heaney represents in similar fashion Robert Lowell’s year in prison as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Lowell was ‘earning his poetic rights by service in the unpoetic world of jail’. Elsewhere, Heaney asks: ‘What right has poetry to its quarantine?’Heaney’s notion ...”

“... in the opposite direction to Helen, leaving Troilus, her Trojan love, for Diomedes the Greek. Robert Henryson picks up the story where Chaucer left it: in The Testament of Cresseid, he introduces into the story of punitive, divine revenge an unusual depth of tragic pity for the hussy.* The character of Penelope also provides a counter-model and comparison ...”

“... and aggression is to be highly valued – in the dog-eat-dog world of the Stock Exchange and in Robert Bly’s drum-beating – then Woman is made to correspond with tameness. Woman becomes despised, dull domesticity. Woman is too much civilisation, the doilies and anti-macassars of Home. Yet commercial mythology cannot get rid of the myth of Home. For one ...”

“... force of repetition: Adler may have been introduced to these techniques by Kafka, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil or Alfred Döblin, but he mastered them by studying Goebbels and Eichmann and his clerks, whom Adorno called Schreibtischmörder, ‘desk-murderers’. The Nazi bureaucrats were responsible for two of the most malevolent fictionalising experiments of ...”

“... about money. With his old schoolfriend and fellow drinker at George Conway’s inn in Lissoy, Robert Bryanton, he is more expansive, but the act of writing a long letter leaves him ‘splenetick’ and apt to recall that Bob is handsome and successful with women, whereas he is not: ‘An ugly and a poor man is society only for himself and such society the ...”

“... European Parliament. The lessons that Macron drew from his 2017 campaign seemed, as the historian Robert Zaretzky wrote, to be the ‘wrong ones’ for 2019. Part of the reason is technical. Unlike the majority system in national elections in France, the European Parliament is elected by proportional representation, which does not produce a single ...”

“... underpin a global system of racialised capitalism and imperial power.In September 1665 the banker Robert Viner gave Pepys a tour of his palatial mansion and proudly showed him a cadaver: ‘a black boy that he had, that died of a consumption, and being dead, he caused him to be dried in an oven, and lies there entire in a box’. On another occasion a group ...”

“... by Christian regimes, yet his overall picture of the 13th century is strongly positive. Contrast Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change, published in 1993. Bartlett’s focus is on the hard edge and sometimes brutal racism of the processes indicated in his subtitle – racism which in the case of Ireland, for ...”

“... and the Gold Coast. Cyprus is a running sore . . .’ This was the real difference with Eden. Robert Murphy, the US Deputy Secretary of State, visited Eden just a fortnight after Macmillan wrote those words. He noted with wonder that Eden ‘was labouring under the impression that a common identity of interests existed among the allies. The Prime Minister ...”

“... remained one of Evelyn’s friends for most of his life. He also enjoyed what was called, after Robert Boyle had popularised the term, ‘seraphick love’ with Anne Russell (whom he dubbed ‘Platona’) and Elizabeth Carey (who became his ‘Electra’). It is exceptionally hard to describe what Evelyn felt for these women: probably it is best to say that ...”