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“... but overabundance. Lutyens and Hislop are not the first to notice this. In 1986, the historian Robert Hewison called his fine study of British culture between 1960 and 1975 Too Much. In Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party, the claustrophobic lounge, crammed with 1970s products (like a cruder suburban version of Peter Cook’s showy living-room) is as ...”

“... is able to trace bonds of professional exchange, kinship and allegiance. When Reyner Wolfe printed Robert Recorde’s The Ground of Arts – a bestseller, ‘teachyng the worke and practise of arithmetike, moch necessary for all states of men’ – Wolfe borrowed eight initials, two ornaments and some textura fonts from John Herford. And a small number of ...”

“... there was no need for a socialist tradition to combat the right or to advance the interests of a self-aware proletariat. Instead all shades of opinion across the political spectrum subscribed unselfconsciously to the American Way of Life, which Hartz labelled ‘mass Lockeanism’. Locke, he insisted, ‘dominates American political thought, as no thinker ...”

“... in Sam Johnson’s verse: ‘the lexicographer’s weighing of the epithet’. And of course the self-educated rector of Winterbourne Came, author of A Philological Grammar and An Anglo-Saxon Delectus, was himself a lexicographer, as his sort of philologist has to be. However, this poem, ‘Moss’, is from Poems Partly of Rural Life in National English ...”

“... to yourself: I’m me.’ Hujar’s subjects seem to have heeded the same advice: they exhibit a self-possession tending to the monumental. You can see it in his 1981 portrait of the actor Madeline Kahn. Hujar posed her in an empty studio, wrapped in a hulking, dark coat: she looks like a solid black mass from which face, hands and legs emerge. The ...”

“... son after nine years in Italy and promptly involve themselves again with Richard’s best friend, Robert, and Robert’s refined cousin and ex-girlfriend, Beatrice. Robert has been trying to lure the uneducated Bertha into betraying Richard (whose avant-garde writing she can’t ...”

“... great resemblance between his own, open-ended journey and the intrusions of earlier strangers: of Robert Moffat, Livingstone and various envoys of the London Missionary Society, who thrived on scruples; of Cecil Rhodes, and an assortment of English and Boer traders, who did without them; of the Voortrekkers, who left the Cape in sombre spirits and travelled ...”

“... The world according to Robert Kaplan has arrived in Britain. The Ends of the Earth is a piece of blockbuster journalism by an American reporter/traveller of some influence whose thinking has shaped the way that other people, more influential still – in the White House, the State Department, the United Nations and the international aid agencies – go about their business ...”

“... merged into a single script. Not surprisingly, two highly successful journalists, David Holden and Robert Lacey, decided to turn their talents to an exposition of this fascinating modern legend. Unfortunately Holden, a distinguished reporter with many years’ experience of the Middle East labyrinth, never lived to complete his book. He had written the first ...”

“... lifts him up high and then casts him down. For instance, he is described as displaying supreme self-confidence in North Africa, so it is disconcerting to find him also described as ‘unsure of himself, hesitant, often depressed, irritable, liable to make snap judgments on insufficient information, defensive in both his mood and his tactics’. At the ...”

“... spaces were not stamped with MoMA approval until now: neither established ones like Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson or rediscovered ones like Yayoi Kusama and Lee Bontecou; and others were rarely seen at all, such as Romare Bearden, Richard Hamilton and R.B. Kitaj in the Pop gallery, and Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica in the Minimalist and ...”

“... of international law currently circulate. One sees the limits of state obligation as drawn by self-interest: they’re taken to encompass a limited degree of altruism by citizens towards their compatriots, but not to extend as far as the woaded inhabitants of ‘bongo-bongo land’, or even the members of the next Neighbourhood Watch. The other view takes ...”

“... role goes to the only politician alive at the time who is unmistakably alluded to by Shakespeare: Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, to whose return from his military campaign of 1599 against the insurrection in Ireland, ‘bringing rebellion broached on his sword’, the Chorus of Henry V looks forward. The incompetence of Essex’s own rebellion two ...”

“... play Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Other actors had been mentioned, including Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum and Sinatra. But Coppola held out; he shot a test in which Marlon made himself up as the old don, and set about finding a creaking, breathless voice for him. Then, in a trice, there was Brando, enthroned for that first scene, with a kitten in his ...”

“... Steve Bannon​ doesn’t like him. Before the conclave, he named Cardinal Robert Prevost as ‘one of the dark horses’ to become the next pope. ‘Unfortunately, he’s one of the most progressive,’ Bannon added. It is unlikely that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who had objected to Pope Francis and wants a return to a more traditional Catholicism, has much time for him either ...”