“... I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic ...”

“... mean that only oaths by the holy body were regarded as truly obscene in the 14th century. Robert of Brunne’s early 14th-century Handlyng Sinne does indeed have the Virgin say that those who swore by Christ’s body have torn the Christ child apart, and that thought is echoed by Chaucer’s Pardoner. But Chaucer’s actual representation of swearing ...”

“... is now writing a soon-to-be-bestselling crime novel with plenty of sex and murder. Her husband, Robert, often rudely called ‘Rob’ by unthinking friends, is a highly adapted commuting machine who works in Canary Wharf and times his drive to the station to perfection. She is interesting, he is not. And they have a child, Lanny, who is both interesting and ...”

“... it was the intrinsic prelude to any sort of European union. In his Declaration of 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister from 1948 to 1953, proposed in words drafted by Monnet, Pierre Uri and others, that ‘Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an ...”

“... first nights, she seldom fails to tell the producer or director how much she loathed the show. To Robert Evans, producer of Love Story, at the Royal Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts ...”

“... star playing a murderer if his character was seen to have been provoked. Bogart’s co-producer, Robert Lord, brokered the agreement: Bogart wouldn’t play a serial killer. He’d be a suspect, but someone else would be found guilty of those murders. However, he would crack under the pressure of suspicion and end up murdering his girlfriend. So in one ...”

“... it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert Dodsley recommended memorising it as an exercise in mental self-training. In Derzhypilsky’s production, having been performed beautifully in its familiar Q2 position in the third act, the soliloquy got an encore at the end of Act V when Hamlet, still not ...”

“... Winter’s Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and ...”

“... case, a technical prerequisite. You need an A-bomb to ignite an H-bomb, and the lab’s Director Robert Oppenheimer reasonably enough felt that the race to forestall the Nazis required no distractions from the main lines of development. Destructive friction between fusion and fission was reduced by giving Teller what was essentially a roaming brief, and it ...”

“... stopped years ago. My laboratory now tests its capabilities by using samples provided by the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. No one has asked me recently whether my electron microscope is still working. To be fair, guidelines are being prepared for action in the event of a deliberate release of smallpox. They assume that it is very unlikely to happen ...”

“... Galip, are esoteric commentaries on Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Mathnawi – a 13th-century work which Robert Irwin has described as ‘a great sprawling series of stories within stories’ in which ‘the inner stories . . . indicate the mystical meanings of the outer stories’ – the reader’s head starts to throb. It’s also true that Borges-style novels ...”

“... repressed pain, I think, behind a sentence quoted approvingly by Bayley in his essay here on Robert Lowell. It is Lowell on Stevens, but it could be Bayley on Bayley: ‘There seems to be something in the poet that protects itself by asserting that it is not making too much of an ...”

“... compared with later examples. In 1983, Elvis Costello’s poignant ‘Shipbuilding’ (sung by Robert Wyatt) was so sidelong a comment on the human costs and economic benefits of the Falklands War that you had to be told that’s what it was. I even have a sneaking sympathy for the campaign agent who chose Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the ...”

“... to check any strenuous effort’ was a common deterrent to excessive involvement in a career. Robert Mackintosh ‘could continue to solicit from his father’s old friends civil service appointments with titles more impressive than the responsibilities they carried. There was no need for him to concern himself with a salary.’ The same confident ...”

“... did A.J.P. Taylor very much good – any more than it did Michael Foot, Harold Nicolson, Robert Bruce-Lockhart, Tom Driberg or any of the other literati who seem to have lost a dimension in the service of that heterogeneous collection of unlikeable lost causes that Beaverbrook picked up. Taylor wrote that the Express was what England would have been ...”