“... in the age of rising nationalisms. ‘The Hungarians were first and last only Hungarians,’ Robert Musil wrote in The Man without Qualities, ‘and counted only incidentally . . . as also Austro-Hungarians. The Austrians, on the other hand, were primarily nothing at all . . . there was not even a proper word for it. And there was no such thing as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a voice-over commentary. This is quite different, however, from the documentary form originated by Robert Flaherty in the 1920s and which is still employed in a large proportion of the films labelled as ‘ethnographic’. In these, a group of characters are followed through a series of activities arranged according to the dramaturgical requirements of a ...”

“... diplomat, who had also been a personal assistant to Hammarskjöld, ran into an old acquaintance, Robert Ahier, at the Paris Opéra. Ahier was a journalist and now held a senior position with United Press International. In the course of their conversation, Ahier told Kemoularia that he had a tenuous lead on the fate of the Albertina. He had come across ...”

“... not straight ethnography, however: Segalen had a case to make, the same case that Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson had made before him, against the degradation of native life which had set in, first with the coming of Christian missionaries to the islands early in the 19th century, and then with the onset of a colonial administration. The Maoris had ...”

“... nights, criminal operations and complicated political double-dealing. The collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach pointed out in 1943 that it was an ideal setting for detective stories, and Patrick Marnham’s gripping book is a detective story of sorts. It recounts the life of a man who was, in himself, particularly opaque. Jean Moulin was ambitious and ...”

“... to these technological developments, and there are even attempts to downgrade their significance. Robert Kubicek argues that in numerous armed clashes between the British and local peoples between 1875 and 1907, ‘both sides had modern weaponry.’ So they did, but Winston Churchill was appalled by the one-sided slaughter at the Battle of Omdurman in ...”

“... enemy but because it was the home of many of the world’s greatest physicists, the country where Robert Oppenheimer and others had gone to do graduate work, and where fission had been discovered. In December 1938, Otto Hahn, Germany’s leading radiation chemist, and his student Fritz Strassmann, profiting from the experimental work of Irène and Frédéric ...”

“... of self-importance’. It attached even to his private writings, notably his surviving letters to Robert Harley, soon to be secretary of state and eventually unofficial prime minister. Harley rescued Defoe from Newgate, after he was convicted of seditious libel. He wanted to use him, and gave him a heady sense of influence over the times. For the first decade ...”

“... qualities of different religions (including all versions of Christianity). His flatterer and agent Robert Dallas (himself a clergyman) advised him against including it and he agreed. A little touch of atheism, one suspects, was calculated to tickle a readership that badly wanted to be sophisticated. The form was also part of the poem’s immediate ...”

“... In ‘Margaret Fuller Drowned’, a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark ...”

“... If, that is, they accepted the Union Treaty, in which the Equivalent figured as Article 15. When Robert Burns wrote ‘We’re bought and sold for English gold,’ he was probably thinking of those Scottish politicians who were directly bribed with cash and job offers, and who became despised and notorious. But the Equivalent was far more effective and far ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”