“... budget. There was no lack of star appeal in the films: Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Redford and Charlize Theron. The negative reception will inevitably be taken as a demonstration that complex and self-examining films are not welcome in a time of war. So the problem is not so much what Hollywood produces as what audiences (and ...”

“... 17th century, Scots Presbyterian culture wasn’t consolidated there until the arrival of General Robert Munro’s Scots Covenanter army in the 1640s. The Scottish famines of the late 1690s brought a further exodus to Ulster of Scots, particularly from the south-west, the stronghold of Covenanting Presbyterianism. The Scots Covenanters were decidedly not ...”

“... in Helsinki after much drink has been taken. On the right sit Sibelius and his composer friend Robert Kajanus, in red-eyed, stupefied half-profile, cigarettes burning; next to them is the unconscious figure of the composer-critic Oskar Merikanto; standing to the left, and looking at us, is the artist himself. He is half-shadowed by what Sibelius and ...”

“... company for whom Shakespeare crafted striking parts, among them the clown Will Kemp’s successor, Robert Armin. Armin’s distinctive style of clowning provided the basis for a succession of melancholy fools: Touchstone, Thersites, Feste and Lavatch. But even he seems to have been expendable. In Lear’s Fool, van Es writes, Shakespeare tested ‘this ...”

“... where he spent three years. Here he relished the elegant geometrical proofs of the mathematician Robert Simson, which contributed in some measure to the love of system so evident in The Wealth of Nations, and was intrigued by the moral philosophy of the Ulsterman Francis Hutcheson, an engaging and enthusiastic teacher whose demotion of the role of reason in ...”

“... put their crosses just where they were going to put them anyway. But some recent research by Robert Goodin and James Mahmud Rice suggests that something more complicated might be going on.* The polls, they reveal, don’t fluctuate in the run-up to an election because respondents are simply humouring the pollsters with the pretence that their opinions ...”

“... in case anyone had missed the point of Bush’s statement, his deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates (now Obama’s secretary of defence), spelled it out a few weeks later: ‘Saddam is discredited and cannot be redeemed. His leadership will never be accepted by the world community. Therefore,’ Gates continued, ‘Iraqis will pay the price while ...”

“... doing trials; just a whiff of defiance can be enough to get a subject banned from a research site. Robert Helms, a veteran of more than 80 trials who founded a jobzine for research subjects in the mid-1990s called Guinea Pig Zero, compares guinea pigging to prostitution. ‘They are penetrating your body,’ Helms says. ‘You are renting out your body and ...”

“... or rather my studied self-contempt is now nearly a disease.’ Finally in 1913 he meets Robert Frost, newly arrived from America, starts writing poetry and joins the army, to die four years later in combat in France. It is a frantic and harassed life in many ways, but Wilson tells her story at just the right pace, with patience and clarity, though ...”

“... and it has to be faced. To invent something more elevated and comfortable, the kind of thing that Robert Nozick offered in his Philosophical Explanations (a book that Williams described as an attempt at the ‘Great American Novel of philosophy’), will not do. Some of the analytical arguments in the book were brilliant, but at the end Nozick departed from ...”

“... generation. ‘I saw more fighting,’ he wrote, than Siegfried Sassoon, or Edmund Blunden, or Robert Graves, far more than Liddell Hart, four or five times as much as Wilfred Owen, and I didn’t go home with a nervous breakdown. [But] I fear the damage is done, and the myth of the 1930s has prevailed … When I meet some clever young scholar from ...”

“... also a good deal of repetition. We are reminded four times of Blake’s maxim, almost as often of Robert Burton’s admittedly splendid description of tears as ‘excrementitious humours of the third concoction’. But Dixon’s instinct for connections and comparisons is unfailingly sharp and illuminating. He ranges effortlessly from Margery Kempe ...”

“... not the hider, who is doing the counting. ‘Doesn’t it annoy you a little,’ Bishop asked Robert Lowell, ‘when people hand you back, like an obligation, flat statements of what you “meant”?’ Colm Tóibín avoids this temptation. On Elizabeth Bishop is an engaging introduction to her life and work, and also an essay on the importance of her ...”

“... Second World War, Leo Steinberg wrote with equal insight on 20th-century innovators like Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and Old Masters like Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Velázquez. Yet this traffic is busier than ever before, according to Nagel, with art historians such as Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp and Georges Didi-Huberman at work on ...”

“... and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate family, seems to ...”