“... a front sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA’s Lieutenant Colonel Robert Simpson was interviewed by Dominic Lawson (‘Dominic’ to Hsu – such is the democracy of computer geekery that he is filed under D in the index); not wanting to appear out of the loop, Simpson explained that an advanced chess program was ideally suited ...”

“... lives. Scotland is a place where cultural artefacts and past battles – the Stone of Destiny, Robert Burns, Braveheart, Bannockburn – have more impact on people’s sense of moral action than politics does. The people have no real commitment to the public sphere, and are not helped towards any such commitment by the dead rhetoric of the young ...”

“... by them: the one naturally follows the other, as the overnight cell follows the police blotter. Robert Lowell was a rather unsavoury fellow; therefore we should not be surprised by the ‘irresponsible obscurity’ (Carey’s phrase) of his verse. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, Carey moves swiftly from quoting unpleasant and fascistic comments about ...”

“... put to work as a response to the much-touted decline of civil society analysed, for example, in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. They are telling us, at this moment of extreme vulnerability, that corporate America (or international finance), in partnership with infinite reserves of personal charity, was creating a wonderful life that has now so tragically ...”

“... reading the newspapers of the time can have something of the same effect, as is well conveyed by Robert Kee’s The World We Left behind. But it’s not the same as a single person’s day-by-day account of – not, of course, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but – what it eigentlich felt like to that person. The dilemma is whether publication should or ...”

“... is compelled to treat as a second nature. This claim, too, had been made first in architecture, by Robert Venturi: ‘The main justification of the honky-tonk elements in the architectural order is their very existence. They are what we have.’ Eventually, Post-Modernism itself would be given a honky-tonk logo and shorthand promo: around 1992, its friends and ...”

“... in selected exemplars of the past, literary and moral. Some are familiar from his earlier work: Robert Southwell, Ruskin, the Church Fathers, Boethius, the Book of Daniel, ‘the solitary great ones – Isaiah, Amos,/Ezekiel’. To these can now be added ‘the De Causa Dei of Thomas Bradwardine’, the Polish poet Aleksander Wat, Milton ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... Lacks. Click. The American Congressional Record. In Memory of Henrietta Lacks – Hon. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr (Extension of Remarks – 4 June 1997) Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920 in Clover, Virginia. At the age of 23 she moved to Turner’s Station, near Baltimore, Maryland, joining her husband David. She had five children, four of whom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... new attributions cohere with the older ones in ways that save the phenomena. To put the point in Robert Brandom’s Hegelian way: to understand the nature of an object is to be able to recapitulate the history of the concept of that object. That history, in turn, is simply the history of the uses of the various words used to describe the object. As Jonathan ...”

“... glass of tea?’ Holmes, enjoying himself, is off the hook, and soon leaves the scene. Holmes is Robert Stephens, wonderfully effete and engaging; Wilder says he ‘never quite knew if he was a homosexual or not’ – offscreen, that is. Watson is Colin Blakely, a kind of terrier of a companion to the great man. When Watson finds out what Holmes has been ...”

“... York this season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and ...”

“... life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear evidence of this shift in sentiment. I spent more years than I like to recall ...”

“... The soundtrack might be Muddy Waters singing ‘You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had’ or Robert Johnson’s ‘Drunken Hearted Man’. Repetition, sexual boasting, showy licks and riffs: the novel has it all. There is even a touch of satanic folklore, in the shape of a ghostly hobo rumoured to be the devil himself. While not exactly ...”