“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and immediately set himself up in the business of selling Ghana.With an American partner called Robert Ellis, he set up a fake company, which he called the Bureau of African Affairs and Industrial Development, in a business district outside Philadelphia. The bureau sold greeting cards with Nkrumah’s face on them, and claimed to have obtained a licence to ...”

“... intended to harm Palestinian civil society’. In December the American political scientist Robert Pape described it as ‘one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history’.What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey ...”

“... In Charles Crichton’s Against the Wind (1948), a team of SOE agents led by a Catholic priest (Robert Beatty) is parachuted into Belgium for the purpose of rescuing a local resistance leader from captivity. The team includes a radio operator, Michèle Denis (Simone Signoret), and an older man, Max Cronk (Jack Warner). Cronk is a double agent: a discovery ...”

“... the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left ...”

“... to Gillian Weir, in the tone of voice in which a gourmet deplores the popularity of hamburgers. Robert Sherlaw Johnson’s essay discusses the gradual development of bird-song in the music, from its recognisable but unambitious beginnings in the Quatuor to its final explosion in the sermon to the birds in Saint François. He shows how Messiaen fitted the ...”