“... 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 ...”

“... that year’s controversy over parliamentary reform. His essay had attacked anti-democrats such as Robert Lowe for using historical analogies from ancient Greece to justify their opposition to franchise extension, since the social and political circumstances of modern Britain were entirely different. Compared to Lowe, Bryce’s instincts were democratic, but ...”

“... Having ventured down the Volga in search of ammunition supplies for his brother’s factory, Robert Nobel arrived in Baku just in time for the oil rush. Within decades their new company, Branobel, had opened five hundred wells. Their twelve thousand employees lived in a workers’ colony called Villa Petrolea. The Nobels were responsible for building the ...”

“... golden thread connecting all genocidaires: ‘Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and other 20th-century mass murderers did not start their genocides until after they had disarmed whom they planned to exterminate … More guns, less genocide.’ Furthermore, according to the NRA, registries put the lives of gun owners at ...”

“... Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert Browne, who in the 1580s lent his name to Ainsworth’s brethren (‘Brownists’), wavered in and out of conformity as conscience and courage dictated. It helped their enemies that some puritans were not only flaky but mad. William Hacket, a ...”

“... coarseness of expression that she had the courage to abandon in later life’.The essay on Robert Hayden, who was the first African American writer to be named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now known as Poet Laureate) reveals some of the limits to Vendler’s sympathies as well as some of the limitations of her way of thinking about ...”

“... thin sociability and inner anaesthesia. ‘These are the tranquillised Fifties and I am forty,’ Robert Lowell wrote in 1958. Thiebaud sniffed the air of lost connections, but he held onto the moment when we all wanted the same things, sensing how fragile it would turn out to be.It is often said that his paint seems to partake of the same materials as its ...”

“... Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgment. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of ...”

“... success to increase his notoriety and win some sort of respect among his peers. In January 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It sold forty thousand copies in Britain in its first six months. ‘There is something almost impertinent,’ Henry James wrote, ‘in the way … Mr Stevenson achieves his best effects ...”

“... the first. The South Bank Show was also reviewed in the Spectator by Richard Ingrams, as follows:[Robert] Redford was followed onto the show by young Martin Amis, a rather scruffy looking man without a tie. I was baffled as to why his new novel should be given about half an hour of publicity when there are so many other things worthy of attention ... Amis ...”

“... poems makes a reader feel that he can only approve the poet’s judgment in not collecting them; Robert Conquest plunges the reader into an obscure background involving reciprocal limericks which were no doubt funny at the time but which are not (unlike those Monteith quotes) funny enough now. In the absence of any more exact sense of subject and form, these ...”

“... full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and playground groups, from ...”

“... 1921 until January 1922 the administration of the Department of Foreign Affairs was undertaken by Robert Brennan, who had been in charge of publicity for Sinn Féin and had latterly been working under my father in the Dáil Publicity Department. De Valera made it clear to Brennan on his appointment that, despite Plunkett’s nominal role, he was to report ...”

“... proposition that the body was nothing more than a complex system of measurable physical processes. Robert Koch’s Institute in Berlin was the epicentre for the bacteriological revolution – one pathogen, one disease and, we hope, one vaccine, one cure – which still dominates medical thinking. And so on. By the end of the 19th century the institutional ...”

“... though it was, was to help foster this American consensus. He admired Commentary’s film critic, Robert Warshow, for once saying, ‘A man watches a movie and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man’ – ordinary in his reaction however exceptional his talents for analysis. Podhoretz is in effect saying, without at first becoming an absolutist ...”