“... failing to intercede on the victims’ behalf. This was the line taken in Massacre in Rome (and in Robert Katz’s book on which the film was based). Cosmatos and his producer, Carlo Ponti, were prosecuted for ‘defaming the memory of the pope’ and received six-month suspended sentences.Even more astonishing were the legal proceedings in 1994 against ...”

“... abandoned it.Among the more surprising heroes in Bailey’s account is the defence secretary Robert S. McNamara, mostly remembered today as a leading architect of the Vietnam War. A lifelong member of the NAACP, McNamara commissioned a study that found many examples of off-base discrimination against Black soldiers stationed in Korea and West Germany. He ...”

“... self-described ‘rational expectations revolution’ began with the work of Friedman’s student Robert Lucas. Keynes had put expectations at the centre of macroeconomics. If you wanted to understand how an actually existing market economy worked, you had to begin with what people expected the future would look like, because those expectations determine ...”

“... history, and its politics are not what you might expect. Last time I was in Colombia I carried Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics: a great help in listing questions about this old and battered democracy, if democracy is what the answers to his questions prove it to be.* ‘Old’? Competitive elections have been held in Colombia, on and off, at ...”

“... worth, less easy to make than it was. So one can argue that Hockney should not have been hurt by Robert Hughes’s description of him as ‘the Cole Porter of modern art’. He has been true to his talent, which is great, and avoided boredom for himself and his audience by turning to photography, computer graphics or Picasso when a line of development did ...”

“... the multitude.’ What’s more, Joyce might stand for the obscuring of story, the triumph of Robert Browning’s oblique ‘truth broken into pragmatic hues’ over the direct address achieved, he said, by his wife: ‘You speak out, you ...’ ‘The novelist had metamorphosed himself into an Artist, and described himself proudly as such. His novels ...”

“... heroes. More relevant by far would be a comparison with Lukács’s contemporaries, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach and Arnoldo Momigliano, who did more for the survival of the values to which he paid lip-service than it was in his intention or in his power to do. There is no mention of these names in the present biography, which is just as ...”

“... lie look ashamed. Henry does it with style.’ All over today’s Washington there are men – Robert McNamara, William Colby of the CIA, George Ball of the State Department – who have written memoirs and given interviews which try to atone for past crimes and blunders. Kissinger, no doubt, would regard even the smallest exercise in atonement as ...”

“... the spark. And there is a new roll of honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the ...”

“... actions often pass unnoticed. One does notice, and wince, every time James addresses Sir Robert Cecil as ‘my little beagle’, or ‘my little wiffe-waffe’ – Cecil was five feet two or three, apparently malformed, and sensitive about all this. One does not notice that James had enough sense to keep Cecil as first minister until his death. And ...”

“... brawling factions in exile, and chronicles the emergence of the increasingly dominant figure of Robert Mugabe. Meredith’s long account of the Kissinger deal, as the result of which Ian Smith became for the first time committed to black majority rule, must be compared carefully with Kissinger’sown forthcoming narrative in the second volume of his ...”

“... other but with all of it ultimately deadening. The story appeared in 1960 in Kenyon Review, where Robert Lowell would very likely have seen it, and where he would, I suspect, have found the penultimate line of his poem ‘The Flaw’, addressed to a woman lying beside him: ‘Dear Figure curving like a question mark’. Callisto’s girlfriend ‘lay like a ...”

“... peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its governors’. Even so, there are dangers in calling Jonson a ‘court poet’ and a ‘conservative’: more of them ...”

“... was an object of suspicion. Over the following years, as he repositioned himself more securely in Robert Walpole’s England, he and Burlington, ‘the architect Earl’, with the gardener William Kent formed the heart of a coterie that made landscape design into an art form with rules, conventions and, for those with eyes to see, quite distinct ...”

“... know enough about foreigners to be able to tell if they were whom they claimed to be. Moreover, as Robert Service reminds us in Spies and Commissars, in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident ...”