“... was appalled by Coleridge (‘a mass of richest spices, putrified into a dunghill’), and advised Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and Alfred Tennyson to give up poetry and write prose instead. Not only his contemporaries fell short. Milton was guilty of unsystematic reasoning (‘It is quite clear that he never studied mathematics very deeply, or political ...”

“... Texans to be president (if only). In 1972 he supported McGovern (but died before the election). Robert Penn Warren, reviewing Patriotic Gore for Commentary, was surely right to say that what most moved Wilson was ‘some courageous manifestation of the old virtues’, regardless of political affiliation. Once when he was asked why he was so anti-British, he ...”

“... though, are a delight and I stand addressing the camera while caressing the 15th-century Sir Robert Waterton and his wife, Cecily. At my back is Lionel, Lord Welles with his bruiser’s face, pudding-basin haircut and elaborate armour, which did not save him from being cut down at Towton on Palm Sunday 1461. Unnoticed on previous visits is a sad little ...”

“... milieu and the Parisian literary underground made familiar in the scholarly work of Robert Darnton. At a longer distance, the aim is to declare Gillray the blood brother of ‘tinkers, tailors, blacksmiths, cobblers’. The scratched and stippled surface of an abandoned Gillray sketch is said to show his ‘unusual attempt to increase the ...”

“... were organised into parties with uniformed paramilitary wings. They operated in what the historian Robert Paxton has called an ‘uneasy but effective collaboration’ with traditional elites, which wanted to maintain order and crush the left. Fascism, from this perspective, was born of particular social conditions that are unlikely to recur in the same ...”

“... Depestre; the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam; the French poet Louis Aragon; the French photographer Robert Doisneau; the Russian-Mexican painter Vlady Rusakov and his father, Victor Serge, hero of the anti-Stalinist left. Several of her works are lost, including The Commune, Louise Michel and Us, a film she worked on in the early 1970s and ‘Guns for ...”

“... According to this line of reasoning – proclaimed in Hungary by Viktor Orbán, in Slovakia by Robert Fico, in Germany by the nationalist leftist Sahra Wagenknecht and the pro-Russian AfD, and in the US by sub-Trumps like Vivek Ramaswamy – Putin’s invasion was merely regrettable (though Trump himself called the first stage of the attack ...”

“... for anyone who has not done it. We can know her preparations. The ones who were useful to her: Robert Lowell (her teacher and the author of the introduction to the US edition of her posthumous collection Ariel), Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith. Adrienne Rich, envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early ...”

“... sources (his chapter about the 1975 referendum, for instance, is based almost entirely on Robert Saunders’s Yes to Europe!, published in 2018). But it frequently feels revelatory when laid out in sequence. He also captures the peculiar atmosphere that permeates the never-ending political intrigue of the fight over Europe. For so many of those ...”

“... Hermann’s at the 2022 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. (It was on loan to Lucas from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, a conservatory in Düsseldorf. How it got there is unknown.) Wang contacted the British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, who in turn contacted Kennedy. On 29 September 2024 the cello, lost for eighty years, made its first proper public ...”

“... military assertion over diplomacy. ‘The most likely outcome of the war,’ according to Robert Malley, one of Obama’s negotiators in the JCPOA, ‘will be a situation of no war, no peace, more unilateral strikes.’ Iran will hunker down, focus on regime maintenance and hope for a better deal, while Israel will strike at Iran whenever it sees the ...”

“... Recent years have seen a spate of biographies of China’s 20th-century leaders, including Robert L. Suettinger’s Life of Hu Yaobang and Chen Jian’s of Zhou Enlai, both published in 2024.* We can now add Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi Zhongxun. Such biographies necessarily intervene in several irresolvable contests. Were these men principled ...”

“... as Anatomy of the SS State, and Uwe Adam’s Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich. Michael Marrus’s and Robert Paxton’s study of Vichy France now fills one important gap, while Randolph Braham’s new two-volume work on The Holocaust in Hungary, massively detailed, covering every aspect of the subject, and based on a lifetime of erudition, represents the ...”

“... Historians do not really belong to separate species and the best cultural historians, Schama, Robert Darnton, Natalie Davis, Greenblatt etc share much with Burckhardt, not least an exceptional talent for history, but the difference, in most cases, is more than one of narrative order. There is a satisfaction, a feeling of truth in the posing and solving of ...”

“... of the Russian Zone and so forbidden to Americans. She was trying to sell a suit that belonged to Robert Capa, who urgently needed the cash. Keller appeared in the crowd. ‘He was neither buying nor selling; he was risking disciplinary punishment, I am sure, to see the Russian soldiers ... Not knowing Russia, as none of us did, he believed or hoped, or ...”