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“... wealth and the weakness of the Byzantine Empire. A sequence of Norman adventurers entered imperial service, first as mercenaries, for pay, and then as rebels, for land: Hervé (full name not known), Robert Crispin (or ‘Curly’) and Roussel (‘Ginger’) de Bailleul. Roussel – the hero of Duggan’s Lady for Ransom ...”

“... of all nations, has bowed down lowest in his presence. The ‘24-carat taste buds’ belong to Robert Parker, a 57-year-old former Baltimore lawyer, who started the bimonthly subscription-only Wine Advocate in 1978, and whose many books on the world’s wines – Bordeaux, The Wines of the Rhône Valley and Provence (1987) and various editions of the ...”

“... as it turns out, is illegal for public employees in New York State), the union leader, Robert Toussaint, was sent to jail and otherwise ‘progressive’ residents spat venom at their train conductors, platform sweepers and track-layers for daring to walk off the job. During the strike I stayed overnight at a friend’s house because commuting from ...”

“... autobiography. He speaks to the camera, we hear him in voiceover, follow his life from army service in Italy in the Second World War to buying a coffin and talking to a priest. In practice, the film is mostly composed of dramatised flashbacks, where the past becomes the present and the future is temporarily forgotten. Scorsese also has the help of a ...”

“... to sound, to all but the most satirical minds, like truth and reason. They sound like honour and service and sacrifice and virtue, monuments of logic, and even cashing in is orderly, a triumph of calculation – you don’t have to ask your lymph glands about it or look at your spilling entrails. You might think the idea of a sequel to Catch-22 was a ...”

“... candidate for the position of staff counsel to McCarthy’s investigating committee. His rival was Robert F. Kennedy, whose father and older brother were McCarthy supporters. These two intensely ambitious and utterly ruthless young men, as alike as peas in a pod, hated each other. Their rivalry ended only with Bobby’s death. Cohn got the much sought-after ...”

“... to form its own organisation, which, if not paramilitary, would at least replace military service by non-combatant service. This was the Chantiers de la Jeunesse. Its director, General de La Porte du Theil, a kind of Vercingetorix, ‘the peasant with the long moustaches’, was eventually arrested by the Gestapo in ...”

“... this young man, the son of a postal worker, born as one world war ends and thus of ideal age for service in the next. His home was Joppa, on the Firth of Forth, a ‘tram heaven’ boasting as it did one of the last cable tram systems (did he ever marvel at Glasgow’s strange-smelling subway in which coaches latched onto an ever-moving cable?). But steam ...”

“... of hundreds of bureaucrats based a few steps away from the White House. At the beginning of his service, Bolton writes, he sized Trump up as an inexperienced and impulsive administrator who had been poorly served by his ministers. Bolton says he believed that Trump’s paranoid and dogmatic tendencies were not innate, and clung to hopes that the president ...”

“... discipline and a privileging of civil obedience above family honour, to inculcate an ethic of service to the commonweal which was thought to have characterised the Roman senatorial class. Tiptoft’s hopes look hollow in the light of the manoeuvrings that followed Edward’s unexpected death in 1483, but his insular version of Machiavellian virtù was to ...”

“... its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson loved more than any other: ‘The Birks of ...”

“... London or Paris, and not the dialectical Freud of Lionel Trilling’s vision (‘we are ill in the service of health, or ill in the service of life’), but the Freud of much analytic practice in New York, and especially of the clinical lingo of the patients themselves. ‘Her Freudian leanings structured her life,’ Robins ...”

“... them with his own loyal troops, he stripped them of their uniforms, dismissed them from service and forbade them to come within a hundred miles of Rome on pain of death. Severus then constituted a new, hand-picked Guard from the best of the troops who had followed him. The auction story is impossible to resist and Guy de la Bédoyère duly starts ...”

“... at every street corner. They saw the end, even for the most renewable resources. One of these was Robert Lamb, who in 1979 published a book called World without Tree. ‘A survey of current evidence,’ he wrote, ‘shows that trees could be so scarce in a mere thirty years’ time that they would already be struggling to fulfil their purpose in the global ...”

“... The belief underlies his veneration for the great ‘talking heads’ like Lord Clark and Robert Hughes, as in a more general way it underlies his love affair with British TV ‘culture’ when it is not merely mausoleum-like. Clearly James’s feeling for British culture is that of the outsider who can dissimulate an insider’s manner, but who will ...”