“... on the UK military. To lead it, Starmer appointed Tony Blair’s first defence secretary, George Robertson, along with Richard Barrons, former deputy chief of the defence staff, and Fiona Hill, former deputy assistant for European and Russian affairs under Donald Trump. The general direction was set in March 2024 by the defence secretary, ...”

“... Twenty-odd years ago I was lucky enough to hear the great Jeannie Robertson, then at the height of her powers as a singer in Scots of anything from ‘classic’ ballads to sheer bawdy. During a sunny lunchtime in Cambridge, after giving a formal recital, she sat outside a pub drinking, talking and singing. One of the ‘travelling people’, turned Aberdeen housewife, subsequently ‘discovered’ and launched as a public performer, she spoke of the time when King James had roamed the country as a gaberlunzie man as if it was just a moment before yesterday ...”

“... boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even mentioned John Major as ‘a close friend’. The programme-makers arranged further such meetings, one in a Spanish castle, to which Greer was asked to invite his contacts. Greer’s network of helpful politicians was about to be exposed when Central Television and its new ...”

“... history into several ages in which different tasks were required of man, after the teaching of John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century Plymouth Brethren minister) had been of no more importance, theologically, than Tennessee snake-handling. Lindsey broadened dispensationalism’s doctrinal base and gave end-times religion mass appeal. In his sceptical ...”

“... aristo to his friends in the pop music world, but his nobbier chums looked down on him a bit. John Richardson says: One of the odd things about Robert was that he always dressed up. The rest of us were in blue jeans and leather jackets and up to no good in the Village, but Robert always had an impeccable blazer, very Old Etonian, consciously so. I ...”

“... more than usually fatuous’. The dowagers are identified as Lady Lee of Fareham and Lady Robertson. The former ‘comes from Maine and looks like the matron of a cottage-hospital’. The latter ‘comes from Virginia and looks like a peach-fed ham’. Given this gratuitous abuse of the guests, it is surprising to find K declaring in the foreword that ...”

“... seek to convince us that it was the Cabinet’s military adviser, the ranker-general Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who tried to concentrate the minds of the civilians and persuade them to evaluate the achievements in Flanders, not the civilian ministers who were trying to oblige him to do so. The Cabinet had begun to go off the ...”

“... liberation theology of Gustavo Guiterrez than with the Protestant fundamentalism of, say, Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Similarly, much common ground can be found between the pietistic Jamaat-i-Tablighi, one of Europe and South Asia’s most rapidly growing Islamic movements, and Father Luigi Guissani’s Communione e Liberazione, a Catholic movement ...”

“... company that would become Theranos (‘therapy’ plus ‘diagnosis’), but her mentor, Channing Robertson, the emeritus chair of Stanford’s chemical engineering department, said that she ‘had somehow been able to take and synthesise pieces of science and engineering and technology in ways that I had never thought of’. He had never encountered a ...”

“... called. The SNP’s demands have softened since late June. Days after the party conference, Angus Robertson, newly chosen as deputy leader and widely seen as a spokesman for the SNP establishment, said a deal that includes ‘safeguards’ for Scotland in Europe would stave off a second referendum. Access to the single market is likely to be the ...”

“... of Venus (1877), where the goddess is in most physical respects, as writer and artist W. Graham Robertson put it, ‘a fine, upstanding slip of a boy’. There are considerably fewer female artists, and women’s bodies, in this show than there are men – a fact the Tate curators acknowledge, along with the infrequency of non-white faces: ‘We have been ...”

“... portraits of the Thirties (and, if there were more space, a related de Kooning and ideally a John Graham too, but at all events one such Gorky). Rosenthal’s view was that ‘in no way’ could such a painting be ‘described as one of the most central works of 20th-century American art. Gorky’s significance was to come later, in the last few years of ...”

“... his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John Stuart Mill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my ...”

“... Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Russian peasants. Even among ourselves the Australian poet John Manifold, also an ex-service linguist and ballad collector, would, like Hamish, return to his homeland and there collect and contribute to a tradition (his work was performed and published as Bandicoot Ballads). Our optimism was immense. After all, we ...”

“... it made womanhood a lightning rod for attitudes to capitalist modernity. What Adam Smith’s pupil John Millar decried as the ‘habits of avarice’ of ‘polished nations’ generated much moral disquiet in 18th-century Britain. People fretted about ostentation and epicureanism, about the emasculation of manners and morals by ‘unmanly ...”