“... in entropy, not to mention proclivity for paranoia, he shares), Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover and Don DeLillo. Often this distinction between Modernists and Postmodernists is artificial, and Gaddis seems to write in the gap between the two dispensations, between different orders of linguistic imagination; and here other peers come to mind as ...”

“... writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs ...”

“... contain huge leaps in time, which are intended to illustrate this. Her American readership is like Robert Frost’s: read by every American schoolchild, both have to be rescued from the flag-wavers with strenous reminders of their ‘dark’ seriousness and formal excellence. In Cather’s case, there is also the rich and bedeviling problem of how to frame her ...”

“... price of gold; and they did this while cursing the work.’ (In his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, Robert Burton condemned ‘that pestilent booke’, ‘not to be read without shuddering’.) Minois delights in strange, Eco-esque vignettes of doomed book-hunting obsessives, like Christina, the daughter of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who criss-crossed ...”

“... messages to me although he’d actually died several years before. I told my psychiatrist about Robert De Niro saying ‘cunt’ when I asked him to while I was watching Casino on TV. She reconsidered her revision of my diagnosis from paranoid to residual schizophrenia. I began campaigning for the release of the most famous paranoid schizophrenic in the ...”

“... in the 20th century, until there emerged what Sedlak calls the ‘chlorine dilemma’. In 1974, Robert Harris, an employee of the Environmental Defense Fund, conducted research in New Orleans and found that ‘men whose drinking water came from the Mississippi River had a 15 per cent higher chance of dying from cancer than men who consumed well ...”

“... on the periphery. Nor did many in the outside world realise quite what was emerging in Russia. Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state, whom Tooze rescues from the obscurity to which he is usually consigned, pointedly noted that this was a new type of despotism, intelligent rather than ignorant like the tsarist one, and to be feared. Wilson preferred ...”

“... or Lhasa, and Amdowan Tibetans still speak a dialect that is barely understood in Lhasa. As Robert Barnett explains in his extensive introduction, they bowed to the holy city of Lhasa, but ran their own temporal affairs, negotiating the shifting tribal and clan allegiances, and accepting obligations and protection from local religious figures. When ...”

“... his statesmanship, the real or apparent brutality in his methods’. And it is certainly true, as Robert Gerwarth has shown in a recent study, that an authoritarian Bismarck myth flourished in anti-democratic circles on the German right during the Weimar Republic. It is also true, however, that Bismarck’s foreign policy, which was marked by a scrupulous ...”

“... did so on the ground that its deviousness was a matter for political debate, not for adjudication. Robert Stevens in his book The English Judges comments that my decision did not endear me to ministers, but I doubt that allowing judicial review to proceed would have been more likely to earn their gratitude. Judges who sit in the Administrative Court could give ...”

“... a hundred years after the introduction of limited liability, by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Merton, who showed that the equity of a limited liability company could be valued as if it were a financial option – that is, an instrument which offers rights over the future fruits of the company’s assets. This option has value – in the jargon, it ...”

“... updates, but there is no advance on Martin Arnold’s The Vikings: Culture and Conquest (2006), or Robert Ferguson’s The Hammer and the Cross (2009), or even Gwyn Jones’s magisterial History of the Vikings (1968, revised 1973). Consider the ‘key questions’ Parker starts with. First, why should Scandinavian societies have turned so suddenly to overseas ...”

“... anything more offensive than rubble.’18There was also a backlash within the profession. In 1966, Robert Venturi inverted Mies’s famous aphorism with the phrase, ‘less is a bore.’ Mies, who died of cancer in 1969, was an easy target for the postmodernists: in 1978, Stanley Tigerman made a photomontage showing his Crown Hall Building in Chicago ...”

“... most notoriously violent moment. The period has been much written about in the forty years since Robert Conquest made the Soviet 1930s synonymous with the Great Terror. Scholarship on prewar Stalinism has bifurcated. On the one hand, studies of the Terror have become more detailed and nuanced. Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, it seems that the ...”

“... table in 1604 were linked to William Byrd.1 The most powerful, the great Protestant statesman Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, was the dedicatee of one of Byrd’s last and most haunting keyboard ensembles of pavan and galliard, so popular that they were still admired and adapted through the centuries when most Tudor music was relegated to the archives.2 ...”