“... application, preparing his own versions for a choir in Edinburgh especially to bring out the cross-rhythmic life of the lines. This informed advocacy precedes his only real deaf spot, a blankness towards the entire epoch of seconda prattica emanating from Monteverdi, so out of tune with its present-day status as to be quite disconcerting. Again and again ...”

“... and Thirties. His son, the third Earl, who took over the work, died tragically young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his own view of the Churchill he had known. He died suddenly in October 1987, having just ...”

“... chromosomal locations are critical. When a pair is found on the same chromosome, the outcome of a cross is much less predictable than when it is on different chromosomes. Mendel, who died a year after chromosomes were first described, chose traits that happened to be on different chromosomes. The British geneticist R.A. Fisher once suggested that Mendel might ...”

“... and managed to be soupily soulful and vaguely prophetic in both languages. He also painted – Robin Waterfield’s biography is good on the recurring features of his art, including its ‘vague ectoplasmic figures, often female’ and the ‘veil of mist as a symbol for the dim access the normal human mind has to higher worlds’. Most of Gibran’s ...”

“... from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and has been described by the Economist as ‘a cross between a think tank, a celebrity summer camp and a liberal arts college’. Every summer it holds a festival of ideas where the great and the good from governments, universities, corporations and foundations, as well as Hollywood celebrities with ...”

“... still. Even foreigners are treated to an intimation of these difficulties, especially once they cross the bridge and enter the thick press of people waiting to be dealt with by Israeli border security, the great majority Jordanian-based or West Bank Palestinians. Most of the festival people with security-friendly names or neutral birthplaces got through in ...”

“... Walzer acknowledges the moral power of the last resort argument – ‘political leaders must cross this threshold [going to war] only with great reluctance and trepidation’ – he suspects that it is often ‘merely an excuse for postponing the use of force indefinitely’. As a result, he says, ‘I have always resisted the argument that force is a ...”

“... Graphics. So I have a little pile of pieces of paper with ‘ideas’ roughly drawn on them: a cross with a pirate flag, a ghost caught on barbed wire, an egg on a tightrope, a cage in prison. Next to me I have a tea trolley with paints and water on it. I draw the picture in pen and ink, colour it in: if it works, I frame it. I can do about three a day at ...”

“... when he opened Rawlinson Poet MS 160. The fact that the poem is bad may be an embarrassment. Robin Robbins’s attack on arguments for its authorship based on parallels may be – is – convincing. But no one has positively disproved Shakespeare’s involvement, and given the conventional nature of the lyric it’s hard to see how they could. If ...”

“... were sold as standalone pamphlets: in 1520 the Oxford bookseller John Dorne had A Little Gest of Robin Hood for tuppence, Robert the Devil for thruppence. Orme makes the suggestion that cheap ‘jest-books’, short collections of riddles and stories, can be seen as forerunners of children’s comics.Around the age of seven, a privileged few boys would move ...”

“... Indigenous perspective.’ So, ‘in an hour or so, Mr U returns, bearing history books. Sitting cross-legged near the Mod, he laboriously hand-inputs much new material intended to address adult son Mike’s critique re the paucity of Indigenous accounts.’Now comes something more interesting: the Pulse. The Pulse is described by our narrator, a Speaker ...”

“... to an audience of businessmen that her government had forced Europe to break down the barriers to cross-border business. By supporting a single European market in goods and services, she said, the Conservatives were taking action ‘to secure free movement of capital throughout the Community’. She saw no contradiction: those who claim to be her heirs still ...”

“... on formulaic elements, but needs to be precisely adapted to the moment. In this respect dear old Robin in the 1960s Batman TV series was one of the best swearers, though his lips were never soiled with a common-or-garden profanity. He could combine ‘Holy’ with more or less anything in order to create his trademark ejaculations, which were always to the ...”

“... redesigned chess pieces as representations of their movements on the board (his bishop is a cross of two diagonals): out with the old symbolism of feudal courts, in with the new formalism of pure function. In his Bauhaus summa, Von Material zu Architektur (1929), translated as The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy sketched the history of art as an evolution from ...”

“... Georgian times, many were social, like the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, some debating, like the Robin Hood, while others were aesthetic, like the Society of Dilettanti. When, early in George III’s reign, the Duchess of Newcastle drew up her own guide to ‘what’s on in London’, she listed not merely theatres, pleasure gardens and so on, but ‘the ...”