“... Edward Coke’s Institutes how well so ever he could plead.’ The royalist historian-physician Robert Brady remarks sourly that Coke ‘hath a fine fetch to play off the Great Charter and interpret it by his Modern-Law, that was not then known or heard of’. Such scepticism​ still appeals to our own knowing cast of mind. All the same, a closer ...”

“... Harry in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. He had several contacts at Broadmoor, including an orderly, Robert Neave (‘Tipster Bob’), whom he paid £9000 to supply him with news about the Yorkshire Ripper and other killers. The investigation had found an email suggesting that Pyatt paid a Thames Valley police officer – never traced – £1500 for a tale about ...”

“... at first, Jesenskà quickly responds to him, as nearly everyone does. A Hungarian doctor, Robert Klopstock, whom Kafka meets at a sanatorium, is similarly enamoured, and he seems to move to Prague mostly to be nearer to Kafka, who then disappoints him with his reclusiveness. Kafka seems unable to refrain from inciting affection, which he then finds ...”

“... affairs. Kennan was glad to do so and invited several outsiders, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Robert Oppenheimer, to join him. They concluded that a sovereignty strong enough to calm French fears about Germany and resist what they took to be the threat of Soviet expansion would have to include the British and that the British, to maintain what they could ...”

“... entire lives, not just in the working day. An alternative was proposed by office designers such as Robert Propst at Herman Miller, who were still working on behalf of the corporations, but who saw Taylorism as deadening the creative forces that were beginning to be seen as useful to business, perhaps as a result of the rise of advertising. Open plan became the ...”

“... came back home. You can count the exceptions on the fingers of one hand: Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, one or two others. Iraq’s social infrastructure still isn’t working, years after the occupation ended; it’s been wrecked. The country has been demodernised. The West has destroyed Iraq’s education services and medical services; it handed over ...”

“... as is attested by the publisher of it. It is also often stated that Barber was a writer. In Robert Winder’s book about immigrants, Bloody Foreigners, he is further puffed as the ‘poet and protégé’ of Johnson, and so another half-baked factoid is fed into the misinformation factory. One is grateful to Bundock for his calm and careful sifting of ...”

“... he’s good at having it both ways on a larger scale too. Reptilian black-ops masterminds out of a Robert Stone novel as well as bumbling CIA bureaucrats, baroque deaths in the bush and casual killings by the side of the road, historical and magic realism, sex and violence and a more ‘sophisticated kind of art’: the guy’s got it all. If HBO can do him ...”

“... the Earl of Essex for treason in 1601 when the earl’s antagonist, the queen’s leading minister Robert Cecil, secretly present in the court, stepped from behind an arras to deliver the impassioned speech that ruined the earl’s defence of his rebellion? Which of the assumptions of disguise by beleaguered or lovelorn dramatis personae can have been as ...”

“... but it was the German who became the world’s most influential ‘Darwinist’. (The historian Robert Richards has written that before the First World War more people learned of evolutionary theory through Haeckel’s publications than through any other source, even if Haeckel’s Darwinismus was a proprietary blend of the Origin’s natural ...”

“... had been intended to prevent. One of the Union’s founding fathers, the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, once spoke of the need to ‘detoxify the relationship between France and Germany’; now, the nationalist toxin is back virtually everywhere in Europe. Nobody at this point can or, for that matter, even really wants to move forward with ‘ever ...”

“... by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet. Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any sense, especially when it came to pornography and drugs. The ...”

“... who executed fifty prisoners by blowing them from guns after the Kuka outbreak in 1872. Sir Robert Davies, O’Dwyer’s predecessor as lieutenant governor of Punjab, defended Cowan wholeheartedly: ‘Blowing from a gun is an impressive and merciful manner of execution, well calculated to strike terror into the bystanders.’ Mountstuart ...”

“... style, echoing Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, whose satirical nihilism was all the rage. Pym and Robert Liddell, a close friend from Oxford, wrote reams to each other in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s brittle manner, relishing her exposure of the tyranny of family relations; she had a Stevie Smith phase too, mimicking the bubbling prose of Novel on Yellow ...”

“... were quite often written down. In the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, the Scottish nobles warn King Robert that if he should let them down and ‘yield Scotland or us to the English king or people’, they will dethrone him and choose another. ‘We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than us to accept you as our king,’ the Aragonese ...”