“... his orders as with unpleasant medicine.’ Augustine’s embrace of human frailty was, in the late Robert Markus’s striking phrase, ‘a vindication of Christian mediocrity’. The cry of the Lord’s Prayer – Dimitte nobis debita nostra, ‘Forgive us our sins’ – was a persistent, penitential reminder of humanity’s need for divine forgiveness. A ...”

“... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I ...”

“... both to Runciman’s romantic extrapolations and to a prose style which at times seems dated, what Robert Irwin has characterised as his ‘Beau Geste idiom’. Abulafia declined when his own publisher asked him to write a history of the Sicilian Vespers on the grounds that ‘one does not impudently replace a classic’, but ‘classic’ does not mean ...”

“... the image of whom as a proto-experimentalist he derived from Renaissance medical texts; Robert Boyle obsessively situated his own discoveries within the context of ancient chemistry; Henry Power wrote long philological letters to other scientists on the history of Greek and Near Eastern astronomy; Edmond Halley learned Arabic just so that he could ...”

“... Sontag cited were so powerfully composed that they attained iconic status almost instantly: Robert Capa’s photograph from 1936 of a Spanish Republican fighter, arms flung out as a bullet hits him (that the photo may have been staged doesn’t alter its influence); or the image, taken in Vietnam in 1972 by the AP photographer Nick Ut, of terrified ...”

“... This is a book about Piaf and her crowd. Rather than trying to get to the ‘real’ Piaf, as Robert Belleret did in Piaf, un mythe français (2013), Looseley is interested in interpreting the myth itself and drawing out what Piaf meant – and still means – to France and to her wider audience. The final three chapters are about her posthumous meanings ...”

“... of answers about the Yugoslav War. Democracy-promoting journalists like Michael Ignatieff and Robert Kaplan were pleased to learn from Djilas that the ethnic violence was the result of Tito’s failure to democratise the country when he had the chance. But they didn’t consider more disquieting problems presented by Djilas. The perceived selling-out of ...”

“... itself? The Complete Poems provides a capacious answer. The volumes have been superbly edited by Robert West and run to more than two thousand pages. There were moments when I felt – to borrow a line from one of the late poems – that ‘there’s too damn much of everything.’ But I also found myself wondering why Ammons isn’t read more outside the US ...”

“... of the Mutiny that she made her greatest impact. As far back as 1844, she had complained to Sir Robert Peel of ‘the very bad system, on which the whole of the Indian possessions are managed’. The East India Company had ‘a negative power, which is quite absurd & prevents everything going on well’. Peel had agreed, and he suggested that it would end ...”

“... It comes from encountering speech as an impenetrable wall – except it isn’t really, as Robert Frost knew. (He used the metaphor of people speaking through a wall, where you can discern the tone but not the words, in his ars poetica ‘The Sound of Sense’.)One could extract an entire book on Proust from Essays Two. When she agreed to translate Du ...”

“... is ‘projection of power’ – but whose power? In the 1960s, the US secretary of defence Robert McNamara and the secretary of state Dean Rusk urged their British counterparts to retain British military forces in the Far East. The British ministers were reluctant, given that ‘the empire was no longer there to justify it.’ The current government ...”

“... patrial concept ‘was transparently designed to favour those with ancestral ties to Britain’; Robert Carr, the Tory home secretary, told his officials that it was politically essential that ‘our family ties with people in Australia, New Zealand and Canada should be given special recognition.’ The British Nationality Act of 1981 caught up with reality ...”

“... He had then been put through the media wringer as head of the Senate judiciary committee during Robert Bork’s failed nomination to the Supreme Court. In February 1988 he had a brain aneurysm, then a pulmonary embolism, and months later a second aneurysm. Beau was in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania, and it had been a lonely time for ...”

“... of Bowie figure for many younger listeners who may never have heard of Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd, Robert Pruitt or Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, before Solange referenced them. There’s a fascinating autodidact’s story there, I think, which is very different from today’s more usual social media dream of effortless, instantaneous global renown. Phillips charts ...”

“... It was through Varo that Carrington met the Hungarian photojournalist Imre Weisz, who had managed Robert Capa’s studio in Paris. They married in 1946, and the first of their two sons was born the same year. Motherhood didn’t hurt Carrington’s productivity – she worked, she said, with ‘the baby in one hand, and her paintbrush in the other’ – but ...”