“... 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 ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... cinema he said he wanted to create a modern movie theatre. That was fine, he was told by Robert Stern, who was overseeing the town’s look, as long as Pelli understood that as far as Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s ...”

“... In June 1995, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced that it had acquired a series of 15 paintings by the German artist Gerhard Richter, collectively entitled October 18, 1977. At 11 p.m. on 17 October, the prison officer in charge of the four prisoners on the seventh floor of the high-security wing of Stammheim prison in Stuttgart had noted in his night duty report: ‘23 ...”

“... manufactured by Dow in large quantities and then deployed in the firebombings of Berlin and Tokyo. Robert Neer, a historian of napalm, quotes a Japanese medical professor describing the carnage: ‘There was no one to rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties, turned ...”

“... Szakall.Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic small talk (‘How’s the ...”

“... There was also the fact that Pratt and Smith’s case was considered at the same time as that of Robert Swan, who had been found guilty of having extorted money by falsely accusing a gentleman of a homosexual approach, but whose version of events (he really had been approached) had been supported by new testimony. After long debate, Swan’s sentence was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... saviour and leader, yet refused to reduce the size of his army. In 1817, the British officer Robert Wilson pointed out that Russia’s population had grown from 22 million to at least 42 million since 1762. In 1828, de Lacy Evans estimated that Russia’s population was 50 million and would reach 73 million in another fifteen years. Since the ...”

“... a literary enterprise organically connected to his career as poet, philosopher and historian. Like Robert Graves, he admitted that he preferred certain books – the Latin classics and the works of Augustine – to others. In fact, he went so far as to make a list of his preferences, provocatively titled ‘My favourite books: I resort to the others not as a ...”