“... in a series of incidents that helped trigger the Civil War: events hauntingly recorded by Robert Payne, who was teaching at Lianda. Lung Yun, arrested and deported to Chungking, later escaped to Hong Kong. He ended his days, like Li Tsung-Jen, an honorific figure in the People’s Republic. In November 1937, as the Japanese swept the Nationalist ...”

“... did, it would only have been to see the interlocutor’s eyes glaze over in bored disbelief. As Robert Louis Stevenson remarked in one of his letters home from Germany, in that situation you just find yourself gabbling on about clanship, tartans, Jacobites and whatever else will make the necessary effect. Silence would imply oblivion – dismissal as an ...”

“... were often strong, his taste, whenever it took off on its own – the early enthusiasms for Robert Natkin, the later advocacy of Arthur Boyd – was unerringly awful. Either way, it hardly strengthened his cause. Take another critical position, more independent but more desperate. This critic is not encamped. There is one sort of art to which he ...”

“... was never going to get out of the land of disgrace, as Densher was never going to make any money. Robert Pippin, in an excellent recent book called Henry James and Modern Moral Life, summarises these dilemmas starting from Densher’s point of view.3 Pippin says Densher can’t take the money because he can’t, in the end, act ‘as if no great moral ...”

“... why anyone’s life, or their pain, matters.This is one problem with Singer’s enterprise. Like Robert Nozick, who starts Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) with a bald statement about the existence and authority of individual rights, Singer premises Animal Liberation Now on the idea that the experiential states of sentient creatures matter in an objective ...”

“... mention, which, judging by the index, puts him on the same level of artistic significance as Robert E. Lee. In 1996, introducing an exhibition at the Royal Academy called Gustave Caillebotte: The Unknown Impressionist, the MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe, along with Marie Berhaut a pioneer of Caillebotte studies in the 1970s (and still his most eloquent ...”

“... he is wholly at home in this world. The three volumes of his biography stand comparison with Robert Caro’s Life of Lyndon Johnson in their ability to show us how power works from the inside. Personal relationships at or near the top matter far more than political posturing. It would probably be wise to remember that in the years ahead.At the same ...”

“... is the journey I decide to take; the legend of Grain, from Hogarth’s drunken boat party, through Robert Hamer’s moody film The Long Memory (1952), to the climate camp protests at Kingsnorth, was history enough for me. Ackroyd provided my starting point: London Stone. This beacon, on the east bank of the Yantlet Creek, is said to mark the point at which the ...”

“... Futures: Rethinking UK Strategy by Susan Ambler-Edwards, Kate Bailey, Alexandra Kiff, Tim Lang, Robert Lee, Terry Marsden, David Simons and Hardin Tibbs.Chatham House, 50 pp., February 2009http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/695/Rising Food Prices: Drivers and Implications for Development by Alex Evans. Chatham House, 11 pp., April ...”

“... by the covenant of the League of Nations that Wilson winched into it. With British helpmeets – Robert Cecil, Walter Phillimore – assisting, it was this initiative that gave rise to the spirit of Geneva. Lauding the League as the first international organisation for peace in which smaller powers set the tone, Ghervas is at pains to clear it of customary ...”

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

“... very centre of its inside; what seemed circumstantial has been redefined as constitutive.’ As Robert Scholes put it, we must ‘make the object of study the whole intertextual system of relations that connects one text to others ... the matrix or master code that the literary text both depends upon and modifies’. That is, he continues, ‘in order to ...”

“... dynamics, so it has fallen mainly to Marxian thinkers to search for the causes of ebbing growth. Robert Brenner has adduced overcapacity in international manufacturing as the trigger of a systemic slowdown starting in 1973. Others have pointed to ‘the rising organic composition of capital’ or – a related phenomenon – the dwindling economic importance ...”

“... film is based. The pages of the novel reveal the credits: a device, as André Bazin noted, that Robert Bresson borrowed for his 1951 adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. Melville’s early films were bookish, and rather talky. But in the early 1960s he began to hone back his dialogue. The first seven minutes of Le Samouraï ...”

“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”