“... is in for the kind of bashing which Posner delivers in one of his chapters to the writings of Robert Bork. President Reagan’s capable and ultra-conservative nominee for the Supreme Court whose rejection by the Senate resulted instead in the appointment of Clarence Thomas. Although legal literalism can crop up almost anywhere, its sharpest American ...”

“... upon the sensation or perception of daring, of breaking a law or flaunting a taboo. Like Robert Frost’s famous definition of free verse as “playing tennis with the net down”, what used to be called “free love” (extramarital, non-monogamous, ambisexual) needs rules to break.’ Thus, this part of the argument goes, we need to define ...”

“... which she joins young and old together by dramatising obsessive and almost psychotic continuities. Robert Kelway, the traitor hero from The Heat of the Day, who is giving away secrets to the enemy from his job at the War Office, is traced to his childhood in peculiarly prosperous and loveless suburban surroundings – or rather not traced, for Bowen is never ...”

“... a world rather than report on one. To those like the absurdly tortuous, sulky and by now moribund Robert de Montesquiou, quick to pick out members of his own plush acquaintance among the novel’s characters (though seemingly blind to any resemblance between himself and the monstrous Charlus, whom he sees rather as a descendant of Balzac’s sinister ...”

“... Cock is a steroid for the hormonal crisis currently under way in American bookshops. 1992 has Robert Bly and his middle-aged Boy Scouts leaping through forests dressed in feathers and pounding drums to scare the furry creatures, consecrate testosterone, and push the sale of Iron John. In Revolution From Within, Campfire Girl Gloria Steinem chronicles her ...”

“... for authoritarian corruption. In his rather wonderful new essay ‘The Culture of Complaint’, Robert Hughes addresses the radical counterpart of this ‘culture war’ and marvels that after the 1989 revolution: ‘The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps ...”

“... and New York. Having made his three-year promise, Roger Smith resigned. His successor, Robert Stempel, assigned four hundred of GM’s best brains and hundreds of millions of dollars to make the Impact roadworthy and salesworthy by 1998. By 1993 Stempel had also gone, but the firm was testing 30 ‘proof of concept’ cars, and releasing optimistic ...”

“... the younger scientists were warned that ‘it would be better not to work with Einstein,’ and Robert Oppenheimer reported to his family that ‘Einstein is completely cuckoo.’ One constructive consequence of Einstein’s opposition to quantum mechanics was that it forced Niels Bohr to formulate his ideas more precisely. In 1935, Einstein, Boris Podolsky ...”

“... The person who elicited his strongest feelings was a young officer met during the war, called Robert MacGill (Hogg ‘loved him’, he said, ‘almost like an adopted son’). Hogg’s conduct was wild, irascible and volatile, both verbally and physically (he got into a number of fist fights at Oxford). He also had what another brother, Neil, described as ...”

“... described by Sargent in his letter to James as ‘the unique extra-human’. That would be Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac. This scion of the nobility (he was descended from d’Artagnan) is familiar to many of us who might not know his name, because he was the inspiration for more major fictional characters than any one person could ever aspire to ...”

“... 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 ...”