“... or desire. There are few scenes more melancholy in 19th-century fiction, or in paintings such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home, than the enforced sale of household goods. Thackeray made a specialism of clearance, in Vanity Fair and then again in The Newcomes; George Eliot followed suit, at length, in The Mill on the ...”

“... here, for the peculiarity of ‘Tu ti spezzasti’ is in its expressive abandonment of precision. Robert Lowell’s notion, in Imitations, of endeavouring above all to catch ‘the tone’ or, failing that, at least ‘a tone’ seems a better guide. The waywardnesses which are wholly wrong in some of Lowell’s other translations have an aptness in his ...”

“... honest God is the noblest work of man,’ observed the great 19th-century American agnostic Robert Ingersoll. Parodying Alexander Pope, Ingersoll offered his ironic support to a liberal Protestant theology that he judged less destructive than its orthodox predecessors. He understood the liberal Protestant God to sympathise with advances in ...”

“... this was the precise context for the legal ruling of caveat emptor – and one of the reasons Robert Boyle included bezoars in his experiments on determining specific gravity was to distinguish true from counterfeit stones. The British East India Company wanted bezoars so much that they were joined at the top of their shopping list only by ...”

“... about evacuees or eyeing the shortcomings of a nation besieged. His sets and costumes for Robert Helpmann’s ballet Miracle in the Gorbals of 1944 were generally agreed to be the only things worth remembering about it. He attended rehearsals at Sadler’s Wells: ‘2 sharp pokes with broken bottles in the face then followed a sort of descent de la ...”

“... She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she attended a meeting of the ...”

“... some reputation, now long gone, in the West. Marlene Dietrich fell to her knees before him; Robert Frost, visiting Moscow in 1962, made a point of seeking him out; he was touted for the Nobel Prize. I once owned an edition of the Selected Stories (from Progress Publishers, Moscow), ransomed from Foyles; my current copy is an on-demand Dutch reprint from ...”

“... colonial war soon came to the rescue. In 1868, Nusserwanji Tata won a contract to supply General Robert Napier’s expeditionary forces in Abyssinia: Napier was leading an expedition against Emperor Tewodros II, who had asked for help quelling internal revolt and, receiving none, had taken hostage the British consul and a group of Europeans. Rescuing the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... came under fire from foreign historians. The most effective blow was dealt by the American Robert Paxton, whose Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (1972) demolished the belief that the Vichy regime was an aberration. Vichy’s policies, Paxton argued, not least the deportation of more than seventy thousand Jews to Nazi extermination camps, were not ...”

“... parliament building, stand as modernist monuments to North Korean soft power. Che Guevara, Robert Mugabe, Julius Nyerere, the deposed Cambodian monarch King Sihanouk (a personal friend of Kim’s) and a pre-presidential François Mitterrand visited Pyongyang. Leaders in Seoul were engaged in their own global encounters on the other side of the Cold War ...”