“... as masterful as anything Malick had ever done. It felt like a religious picture or something Robert Bresson might have attempted, and in addressing the question of whether to be complicit with evil it led one towards a larger anxiety, that stories might lose their worth in a world close to ending. I do feel that there is in Malick’s work an ultimate ...”

“... tried to suppress the book and to buy up copies from bookshops. It’s almost a relief to turn to Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office until his vehement opposition to appeasement led Chamberlain to kick him upstairs to the House of Lords, who proposed a different enemy: Prussia and Prussianism. He told Lord Halifax that the war ...”

“... letters’ in an antique shop in Arezzo. Whether 19th-century or 21st, the tale has echoes of Robert Browning’s discovery in Florence in June 1860, at the market in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, of a collection of documents relating to a Roman murder case from 1698. ‘The old yellow book’, as Browning came to refer to it, formed the basis of his ...”

“... to circumnavigating the Earth 120 times.It isn’t known whether the albatross already belonged to Robert Edmond Grant when he started to put together his collection in 1827. Grant arrived in London that year from Edinburgh, where he had taught Charles Darwin and studied marine invertebrates with him in the Firth of Forth. All 12 of Grant’s brothers joined ...”

“... them as a robust prediction of relativity. Among the most important clarifications came from J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was teaching theoretical physics at Berkeley in the 1930s when he and a graduate student, Hartland Snyder, worked out what would happen to a star after it exhausted its nuclear fuel. With no more outward-directed pressure coming from ...”

“... back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling conflicting stories of exactly what had ...”

“... latter hack was in fact the work of GDU agents hiding behind the Guccifer persona. In July 2018, Robert Mueller, special counsel for the Department of Justice, indicted twelve GDU agents suspected of being involved in the hack on the DNC servers.Spear phishing is an example of a broader phenomenon known as social engineering, where hackers use psychological ...”

“... a return of sorts to the day before the meeting with Pascal, when she encountered Lucien’s uncle Robert, who may be planning something sexual for her, then a brief shower, and at last she’s off to her meeting, back in the narrative present. I wish I could say there is a reason for any of this, but I was left with the impression that Kushner had groped her ...”

“... down (the queen raised a £25 compensation fund from her loyal subjects), and three years later Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, had his Italian pyrotechnician pull out the stops at Kenilworth in a final, futile bid to win Elizabeth’s heart.Her successor, James I, was also a firework fan, despite or perhaps because of the fact that he narrowly escaped ...”

“... and the dancers and choreographers in The Red Shoes – Moira Shearer, Léonide Massine and Robert Helpmann – play versions of themselves. Pressburger based the character of Lermontov on Diaghilev, but it also has elements of the imperious Korda, as well as both himself and Powell. ‘I live cinema,’ Powell told the French director Bertrand ...”

“... winner’). In 1971, two years after visiting Universe 25 for National Geographic, the journalist Robert Conly published the popular children’s book Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which was partly inspired by Calhoun’s research.Calhoun’s ideas seem to have become even wilder towards the end of his life, though all three authors are too polite to say ...”

“... and Making History (1984), consolidated his critical standing, earning plaudits from John Peel and Robert Christgau.Johnson​ has maintained that ‘writing poetry or making music … is not a substitute for hardcore political activism.’ But his poetry was intertwined with that activism: he drew inspiration from the anti-racist movement and chronicled ...”

“... One was for Ferdinando Wainman, a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council; another for Robert Hunt, the church’s first minister and chaplain of the expedition that founded Jamestown. Hunt was an Anglican, naturally, given that the town was established in 1607 not just as a commercial plantation and trading post, but as a bulwark of Protestant ...”

“... not many Surrealists were active in the Resistance. Éluard participated, as did the poet Robert Desnos, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and died a year later at Theresienstadt. Another committed Surrealist was Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob), whose marvellous anti-memoir of texts and photomontages, Aveux non avenus, has appeared in a new ...”

“... not astoundThe virtuous mind.Indeed I also find myself reflecting rather sadly about a couplet of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is what has been so often attacked in later years as child-cult, the literary man pretending to be a child to make himself look sweet: but I think the people who attacked this didn’t recognise the merit of the child cult when it is ...”