“... of the Street. At times, the Rome that Long has unearthed from the documents looks oddly like Robert Musil’s Kakania.Yet as Piers understood, many individual projects succeeded, in a distinctively Roman way. In antiquity, aqueducts – gently sloping down to the city from springs and lakes in the Alban hills – had filled the city’s fountains and ...”

“... true to history. In Norfolk protesters muster at Wymondham, where their leader, the yeoman Robert Kett, decries illegal enclosures while declaring his loyalty to the Edwardian regime. ‘Christ’s blood, sir, we’ll open the Protector’s eyes to the true state of things,’ he promises Shardlake and his company, grimacing at their finery and soft ...”

“... never left the drawing board. The Dyna-Soar was cancelled in 1963 by the then defence secretary, Robert McNamara. But the dream never died, lingering on in obscure budgetary allocations over ensuing decades, none of them yielding anything of practical use. Despite the bombast on both sides of what we have to call the New Cold War, current efforts will almost ...”

“... in evolution about which opinion was divided but not generally hostile. It was 15 years since Robert Chambers had caused a sensation with the anonymous publication of his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria, and in his novel Tancred, where it features as The Revelations of Chaos, Disraeli parodied ...”

“... as rotten and the new monied classes as pox carriers. In ‘The Play-House: A Satyr’ (1689), Robert Gould attacks not only actors and prostitutes but also the surgeons who ‘heap up an Estate by our Debauches’, participating in the pox economy by charging ruinous amounts for ‘cures’: ‘Expensive Malady! where people give/More to be kill’d than ...”

“... and made contact with the American counterintelligence corps (forerunner of the CIA): his brother Robert had bills of lading which proved that the Russians were stripping East German factories and sending materials back to the Soviet Union. In 1948, on a trip home to Rostock, Kempowski was arrested by the NKVD and charged with espionage. The experience is ...”

“... touch such weathered stones of deep cultural time as Democritus and Lucretius, Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, conduces me, at least, to conviction: I can think of only a handful of films that have had the profound impact on me that Keiller’s London did when I first saw it in the cinema. With its acute intercuts of London’s raddled face – which even ...”

“... of Kennedy’s best and brightest, which was meant to balance out the number-crunching prowess of Robert McNamara and the Whiz Kids. In his dozens of books of American history – several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one ...”

“... Kenneth Bainbridge said after observing the Manhattan Project’s first nuclear detonation. But Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’ It’s easy to imagine Trump liking the sound of that. Or are we insufficiently worried because we now find it harder to envisage the precise form that a nuclear ...”

“... as Collier and Fielding put it; while Harriet Smith’s painful awareness that her suitor Robert Martin hasn’t read the right sort of books (‘I believe he has read a good deal – but not what you would think any thing of,’ she admits to Emma) shows the snobbery behind superficial learning. What the Cry – and by extension polite society at ...”

“... library. Convalescence was transformed by a gift from his cousin, a copy of The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson.These glimpses were a romance of the road. Adolfo was feeding me titbits from twice translated interviews. But his portrait of Vaes, so decisively sketched, fired my selective misreading. The fiction of our weary march is that ...”

“... way from the marriage plot, which underwires so much literature. ‘It’s the story of life,’ Robert Sean Leonard’s character once explained on the TV show House. ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets stupid. Boy and girl live stupidly ever after.’ The Angry Young Men who were Delaney’s fellows and friends came out, sharp-nibbed, against that dispiriting ...”

“... is now not only our poem, but the poem of Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, Eliot, Auden. Only Robert Graves and Laura Riding saw through it; but to return with them to the Shakespeare of Donne and Marvell is to abolish the Shakespeare of Keats and Yeats. Malone’s edition, of course, had a more problematic consequence for Shakespeare: it had him pining ...”

“... Vegas (1972), the principal manifesto of Post-Modern architecture. There, in a famous opposition, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown distinguished Modernist design, in which ‘space, structure and programme’ are subsumed in ‘an overall symbolic form’, which they called the ‘duck’, from Post-Modern design, in which ‘space and structure are ...”

“... to them in Shakespeare or Milton or Macaulay than by reading approved ‘left-wing’ authors. Robert Blatchford’s socialist newspaper, the Clarion, was truer to working-class experience than Fabian pamphlets: Blatchford realised, as Rose puts it, that the Labour Party’s ‘doctrinal texts were nothing less than the whole canon of classic ...”