“... 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 ...”

“... their home. Johann Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and Gardner Wilkinson took their ...”

“... were to speak candidly about their views in a confirmation hearing, they would be rejected, as Robert Bork was rejected in 1987. It is good that Bork was defeated: he was a thoroughgoing cultural and political conservative. But he did at least explain himself forthrightly.Tolerance of evasion, obfuscation and lies is a big part of the crisis that hangs ...”

“... built in the same Trianon style as those of French connoisseurs such as Boni de Castellane or Robert de Montesquiou, but are seen as merely imitating them. Your collection specialises in the again fashionable 18th century – you are sequestrating the French patrimony. (Angst about ‘cultural usurpation’ was a pre-echo of the current ‘great ...”

“... la Mare, although his illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of ...”

“... most a few pages long, takes its first line from another writer (Arthur Conan Doyle, Marie NDiaye, Robert Walser). In the course of this repurposing, Serre seems to shed her fabulist narratorial armour. Good things happen: a mother becomes unrecognisable – more affectionate and practical and chicken-roasting – overnight; a therapist turns out to be a ...”

“... are audibly mapped.There are also thousands of memorable moments, some distinguished by hindsight (Robert Maxwell declaring: ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it’), some by the way radio forefronts every tic, hesitation and obfuscation, and some by personal revelation. In 2020, as Covid added a piquancy to the ...”

“... But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for television and Lessing put together a selection. But by the 1980s, in the Dirty Realist era of ...”

“... of the operations of art world and culture industry alike. More recently, the American artist Robert Gober has taken up Magritte’s way with simulacra – that is, objects that look eerily real but aren’t – in order to explore fantasies that are both private and public.I like the idea of Magritte as much as his art. David Sylvester, who oversaw the ...”

“... via the New Yorkers, to strike a chord with a younger generation of poets such as John Forbes, Robert Adamson and John Tranter, who included the entire sequence in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (co-edited with Philip Mead) published last year. In their introduction to the volume they argue that ‘these unsettling works of the imagination ...”

“... it had to be provided with the discipline of its own market economy: such was the conviction of Robert Lowe, Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education under Palmerston, not a businessman, indeed one who thought that the narrowness of businessmen’s views inhibited their effective action, but roped in by Searle to represent that political ...”