“... camera adopts the perspective of a hotel valet peering through keyholes into guests’ rooms, and Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, from 1946, filmed entirely as if from the point of view of detective Philip Marlowe.) Similarly, the editing technique of shot/reverse shot – the camera shows an actor’s face, then what he is looking at, then the ...”

“... on one side and the Houses of Parliament on the other, while Lenin, William Morris, Marx, Engels, Robert Owen and a multitude of workers look on in approval.The pedigree of the mural was impeccable – Hastings painted it with the assistance of the muralist Clifford Wight, and both men had worked with Diego Rivera in the US – but today it is as embarrassing ...”

“... querulous and troublesome dependents: the blind poet Anna Williams; the drunk and morose physician Robert Levet, commemorated by Johnson in a beautifully spare poem of 1782; a young black servant, Frank Barber, whom he sent to school at his own expense, and to whom he left a large sum of money; and the ‘surly slut’ Poll Carmichael, probably rescued from ...”

“... machinations of a teenage draft-dodger, Antinous (played in adulthood by a charismatically slimy Robert Pattinson). The main emotional arc of the film concerns Odysseus’ belated realisation that he is complicit in Sinon’s exploitation because he failed to tell him the truth about the Trojan Horse plot. Once he recovers his memory, Odysseus is racked by ...”

“... was the author of these novels, until I noticed a tiny credit on the title page: ‘Text by Robert Arthur’. I looked ‘text’ up in the dictionary to double-check it meant what I thought it did. It was disappointing to discover that Hitchcock himself hadn’t written any of these stories, but it didn’t stop me from wolfing them down.In the late ...”

“... race.’ ‘This calm declaration of a dying man was so well calculated to do mischief,’ wrote Robert Southey, who was among the crowd that morning. It convinced Southey that ‘revolution must inevitably come, and in its most fearful shape.’ Many had arrived at the same conclusion. Through the 1790s, war with France had ground towards a costly and ...”

“... of sanctions as a tool of coercion has often been criticised within the US establishment. In 1997, Robert Pape, a political scientist much admired by policymakers, published the influential paper ‘Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work’. Pape argued that even the most severe economic measures would inevitably run up against nationalist resolve, and that no ...”

“... minutes to Olympic glory, a corkscrew clock tower (with broken clock), a steam engine called ‘Robert’ (home to dozens of incontinent pigeons). Beggars, junk-dealers and God-ranters have been expelled from more salubrious districts. Across the road is a labyrinthine mall-tunnel of Poundland bargains, sachets of Calf’s Pizzle at £1.99 a hit. And an ...”

“... and its allied disciplines shut up shop and go home. So we have the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Foley: ‘For centuries, humans have wondered about why humans are the way they are, and they’ve turned to philosophy and to religion to answer that question.’ But humans should stop doing that: Darwin allowed us to set philosophy and religion aside ...”

“... these beginnings, an extraordinary financial and quasi-political realm was built. Its architect, Robert Hart, was just 28 when he became Inspector-General in 1863. Rapidly winning the confidence of the Chi’ng court, he went on to create the first modern administrative system in China. Its core was a fiscal bureaucracy that assured the late imperial state ...”

“... the bath. My mother’s family, the Peels, descendants, so Mam’s sister Lemira claimed, of Sir Robert Peel, had once been well-to-do, owning mills in Halifax. The youngest of the three sisters, Aunty Myra was the keeper of the family flame, determined that if her present did not amount to much, a sales assistant in White’s Gown Shop in Briggate living in ...”

“... fighting to the last bullet to defend Hitler in his bunker, could emerge as best choice for the Robert Schuman Prize for services to European unity.* Why should European justice too not let bygones be bygones? More generally, appointments to the court had little or nothing to do with juridical qualifications. Nearly all were political. The Belgian judge was ...”

“... broadly right, even if it is far from the mainstream view among the Anglo-American commentariat. Robert Kagan, for example, remains bullishly confident of America’s supremacy in his new (and ruefully titled) book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.* He believes that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the ...”

“... I lack musical intelligence – for which I don’t even have genetics to blame. My older brother, Robert, is a successful pianist. Or, to quote my book Beethoven’s Kiss: Dr Train, the psychoanalyst my father had me see when [my brother] Steve killed himself, once told me, after having determined that my mother hadn’t caused my homosexuality, that the ...”

“... a little aloof (‘a kind of hidden stranger among his New York intellectual peers’, Robert Alter very perceptively said of him, in a slightly different context), was prepared to write the story of his generation. When he had lived long enough and seen enough, when the fates of his contemporaries had played themselves out enough, it fell to Kazin ...”