“... once the rather complicated stipulations attached to the grant have been met. A charity called Robert Wilson Challenge matches funds raised locally. The finances for the restoration are pretty nearly in place.What is St George’s future as a parish church? Its congregation has been growing, and the efforts of some regular parishioners drove forward the ...”

“... the sleazy stories about bonking bimbos achieved a dominant influence in the circulation charts. Robert Maxwell, who bought the Mirror in 1984, did not attempt to reverse the vulgarisation process; when he was not rifling the pension fund he seemed to be chiefly interested in getting a picture of himself in every issue. But in the last few years, under ...”

“... did Helms introduce him to senior figures in the CIA, but he set up a meeting between Amit and Robert McNamara, then the defense secretary: McNamara found Amit’s arguments persuasive, and he conveyed them to Johnson the same evening. The president understood that Israel was going to act; he set up a special task force to handle the situation, headed by ...”

“... by the right-wing pundit and Goldwater acolyte George Will and a cheeky afterword by the liberal Robert Kennedy Jr), Goldwater’s collection of inspirational speeches pays rereading. The Conscience of a Conservative laid the groundwork for the Republican resurgence, and its encomiums to free enterprise, liberty and national might shaped the agenda of the ...”

“... thy remnant shall fall by the sword … Thus will I make thy lewdness to cease from thee.’ Sir Robert Anderson, in charge of the investigation in its early stages, later wrote in his memoir that his chief suspect was a ‘low-class Jew’. But this man, whom he does not name, was almost certainly Aaron Kosminski, who was incarcerated in an asylum though ...”

“... a grizzled and garrulous 1960s Californian sage who seems to have escaped from the later work of Robert M. Pirsig (Lila rather than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). The passing landscape remains real, but the secondary figures in it are so insubstantial that only Kellas and Astrid are alive, and their surviving vigour sometimes seems in ...”

“... succeed in warding off his prime fear, that of splitting the Tories. ‘I cannot become another Robert Peel in my party,’ he moaned. Well, the party split anyway, and unlike Peel, Balfour had achieved nothing. In the same way, the Declaration for ever associated with his name, which derived from his long-standing friendship with Chaim Weizmann, contained ...”

“... Early in​ 1971, Robert Hughes, recently appointed as Time magazine’s chief art critic, was ripping out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt ...”

“... and sciences’, created a corporate sponsor for knowledge-gathering. One of its founding members, Robert Boyle, a Hudson’s Bay Company shareholder as well as an Irish plantation owner and an EIC director, wrote questionnaires to guide the RSL’s factors, who eagerly supplied the society and other metropolitan institutions with travelogues, dictionaries of ...”

“... some were struck by seeing the names of friends or, on a repeat visit, their own earlier entries. Robert Pike took the opportunity to mention that he was ‘from London’ and a ‘patent self-adjusting truss manufacturer and merchant’.The book is a rare survival that brings us close to contemporary experience, but its scope is necessarily ...”

“... of ‘savages beneath our white skins’ exhilarated him. He preferred H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson to Henry James, because their romances seemed to have a primitive gusto. Although Lang co-wrote a fantasy novel with Haggard, his most effective literary use of anthropology came in the form of The Blue Fairy Book and the other ...”

“... expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside the ...”

“... south-eastern shore of the Black Sea that were never recovered. That same year, 1071, the Norman Robert Guiscard took Bari, the empire’s most important Italian possession. Alexius seized the throne a decade later, wiping out the provincial levies of his rivals with the help of Turkish and Latin mercenary armies. A similar calculus lay behind his request ...”

“... complex strains, including the narrator’s revisiting of her adolescent sexual relationship with Robert Turner, her philosophy teacher and Stone’s colleague. Through Stone, she comes into discursive if not actual contact with Turner, whom she last saw several years earlier. Contact here is mediated: we are in the realm of missives as well as kisses; of ...”

“... One is the principled, compassionate statesman who lays down his life for his convictions in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. The other, more or less diametrically opposed, is the zealot and vindictive persecutor of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, who takes savage delight in flogging heretics. The attempt to claim, for one agenda or another, this ...”