“... to the trouble of finding and reproducing an ‘extremely rare’ and unkind caricature of him by Robert Dighton as ‘the Macaroni Painter’. Northcote later claimed that Maria ‘always despised’ Cosway. That would seem to be an exaggeration, but it was, if not exactly a marriage of convenience, certainly a convenient marriage. He was in love; she was ...”

“... of vernacular satire – some of it, like the first printing of Piers Plowman made in 1550 by Robert Crowley, and other artisan, plain-Piers complaint, brought out of Lollard-tainted obscurity. King makes a solid rather than a lively read. He is best on Crowley and William Baldwin, perhaps – their activities in the book trade, and their satirical ...”

“... the best in the country, and education – including that offered at a nautical school run by Robert Burns’s friend David Sillar – was counted high. There was suddenly a book shop, Templeton’s in the High Street, and newspapers from London, along with the hot political and literary journals of the day. In a flash, Irvine became a town that was part ...”

“... hailed in a copy of La Poussière de soleils as a ‘modern Julius Caesar’ – Proust, Colette, Robert Desnos, Pierre Loti ‘dont on ne doit prononcer le nom qu’à genoux’), self-promoting publicity handouts, details of his extravagant theatrical ventures, press clippings describing his roulotte, a luxury caravan he had custom-built and of which he was ...”

“... For God’s sake leave me alone!’ ‘Why the hell should I?’ ‘What’s it to me anyway?’ That sort of unilateral declaration of indifference must be the starting point of nearly all family quarrels, and plenty of political catastrophes as well. ‘Why should I always give way to other people? Am I my brother’s keeper?’ But eventually the question will be turned sarcastically back on you ...”

“... it operates a strange amalgam of common law and Continental practice, and just as in 1946 Robert Jackson, who led the US legal team, was incapable of transcending his belief that the American system alone guarantees a fair trial, so in The Hague the American lawyers seem strangely unable to adapt to those elements of Continental practice which have ...”

“... 1978. Humphrey Bogart’s momentum, his Jacobean wit, is transformed by the passage of time into Robert Mitchum’s monumental disdain. Mitchum is breathless, sculptural. He moves with extreme reluctance, as if charging an excess tariff for every step. Sallis understands how it’s done, he’s been to the classes. He’s learnt how to assemble the ...”

“... lift each other in a tentative balance, was advanced both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened ...”

“... at any rate in the case of Israel). The greatest fears of right-wing nationalist gurus such as Robert Kagan concerned the future emergence of China as a superpower rival – fears lent a certain credibility by China’s sheer size and the growth of its economy. As declared in the famous strategy document drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz in the last year of the ...”

“... they are only slightly more so than my aunties’ insistence that we are descended from Sir Robert Peel, or my own thought, once voiced at Gilpin Place and briskly squashed by Dad, that Uncle Clarence, my mother’s brother killed in the First War, might be the Unknown Soldier.I still have much of Aunt Eveline’s music, albums covered in brown ...”

“... 1990, which introduced sulphur dioxide trading. Economists such as MIT’s Richard Schmalensee and Robert Stavins of Harvard’s Kennedy School also became involved. They didn’t simply advocate a cap and trade scheme, but helped it gain political acceptance. The 1990 legislation differed from what economists might have wanted in two respects. First, there ...”

“... court, and the Algerian struggle the ‘common struggle of all the colonised’. In this way, as Robert Young has recently argued, The Wretched of the Earth could become the ‘Bible of decolonisation’ for black activists and anti-colonialists around the world. Fanon was able to make this generalising move partly because of the ideas on ‘race’ which ...”

“... history of promiscuity, it was his wife who left him. The same year, he assisted the photographer Robert Frank in getting a Guggenheim, the proceeds of which Frank used to make his own masterwork, The Americans, which not only self-consciously built on Evans’s book, but in some ways, which Evans surely recognised, surpassed it. Diane Arbus, another ...”

“... In Praised Be Our Lords, he quotes a letter he wrote from jail in 1969 to Philippe de Saint-Robert, a Gaullist of the left and the author of Le Jeu de la France, which he had just been reading. The letter was signed off by ‘an ordinary young Frenchman who, because he loves his country and its people, went to Bolivia. Everyone plays … in his own ...”

“... these antique grounds. Income tax was reintroduced in the early 1840s by the Tory prime minister Robert Peel, who argued that a modest levy would actually help protect property from more severe despoliation in difficult times. Once the danger was past, it could be repealed, as Peel proposed to do after three years. Of course, all times can feel like ...”