“... Except for sex, the self-conscious rock and roll wild man is always ready to make his mark. When Robert Stigwood failed to pay up after a series of concerts, he got trapped on a staircase and kneed by Keith 16 times, one for each grand owed. Not that Stigwood apologised (‘Maybe I didn’t kick him hard enough’). Occasionally, he’s a little coy. His ...”

“... to utopian socialism, along the way taking in the blither forms of libertarianism such as Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, on which Geuss does a useful hatchet-job. The much quoted opening sentence of Nozick’s book reads: ‘Individuals have rights and there are things no one can do to them (without violating those rights).’ Even ...”

“... some more at Le Moulin d’Or in Soho before repairing to Edith’s Belgravia flat. The playwright Robert Bolt, whose work was performed by many of the family (Corin made his mark in the film version of A Man for All Seasons), expressed bafflement that Lady Redgrave put up with it: He seemed to want everything – some of it for his reputation, much of it for ...”

“... small Sandemanian congregation, founded by the dissenting Dundonian John Glas and his son-in-law Robert Sandeman, lived by a plain – one might say, ‘empiricist’ – reading of Scripture. They preached brotherhood and purity, which in Faraday’s case at least did not preclude moderate drinking and trips to the theatre, and after Sunday morning services ...”

“... of Silence, the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton quotes the Nobel Prizewinning bacteriologist Robert Koch’s prophetic remark, made in 1905, that ‘the day will come when man will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague.’ ‘There is likely no place on earth untouched by modern noise,’ he goes on. Even far from paved roads in ...”

“... and so many like it was the wartime British naval blockade of Germany. And behind the policy, Lord Robert Cecil, the maverick son of the late Victorian Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury, and minister for blockade in Lloyd George’s wartime government. The aim of the blockade was to damage Germany’s war effort but not Britain’s relations with ...”

“... A senior official told Scahill that Obama was ‘surprised and upset and wanted an explanation’. Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama, suggested that the boy wouldn’t have been killed if he’d had a ‘more responsible father’. A wrongful death suit against US officials for the death of both al-Awlakis and a third US citizen is pending. Scahill ...”

“... again as a world power. Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s war secretary, took a different view. So did Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice, though Jackson was clear that ‘you must put no man on trial under forms of a judicial proceeding if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty … the world yields no respect for courts that are organised ...”

“... Motherwell), Cage was well placed to soak up ideas. He played chess with Duchamp, and befriended Robert Rauschenberg, whose notorious White Paintings – a series of rectangular canvasses painted plain white – have often been seen as the visual counterpart to 4’33”. Cage recognised that the ‘emptiness’ of Rauschenberg’s paintings was no such ...”

“... in William Wilkins’s National Gallery, Elmes, Cockerell and Rawlinson’s St George’s Hall and Robert Smirke’s British Museum. Although the scale and scope of the society’s activities was new, the premise that Greek monuments were valuable primarily as a visual quarry for the improvement of British art was not. Ever since the Earl of Arundel had begun ...”

“... James is joking. Somewhere along the line, though, the comparisons become routine. James mentions Robert Lowell accusing himself, when mad, of being Hitler, and launches into a riff on the fact that few people accuse themselves of being anonymous small-time Nazis. His own idea of self-deprecation involves measuring himself against Hitler (twice), Napoleon ...”

“... Abendroth made exhaustive use of German archival sources in Hitler in der spanischen Arena (1973); Robert Whealey devoted a well-informed chapter to the matter in Hitler and Spain (1989); and there are two monographs based on German and Spanish archival material, Economic Relations between Nazi Germanyand Franco’s Spain (1996) by Christian Leitz and ...”

“... et misères at the Musée d’Orsay, given a red-plush overall design by the opera director Robert Carsen, is a vast and sprawling show: aesthetic, sociological and historical, from high-end paintings to low-end memorabilia (police reports, brothel calling cards, and a ferocious gimletty prodder which, as far as I could work out, was for puncturing a ...”

“... was the one who had lent the Windsors the Château de Candé. Now he embarked on negotiations with Robert Ley, leader of the Arbeitsfront, the German Labour movement, to set up a semi-state visit. While it’s hard to agree with the implication of Cadbury’s remark that Ley ‘represented the ugly face of the Third Reich’ – as if there was an attractive ...”

“... of other names in Montpellier and Périgueux. He was in a three-person cell that included a Jew, Robert Kirschen. In 1942, the Gestapo pounced on a Resistance network at the Maison de Chimie, and Kirschen’s younger brother André was among those arrested. André, at 15 the youngest of them, was the only one not shot, but in ‘compensation’, both his ...”