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“... Gallery, paid the astonishing sum of 2300 guineas for Piero’s Nativity. This was the highest price in the sale of Alexander Barker’s collection, which included numerous masterpieces, among them Botticelli’s Mars and Venus. The purchase was endorsed by leading artists, and Benjamin Disraeli gave it his support. Piero was now fully established as an ...”

“... calls attention to the ‘shocking’ evidence of sado-masochism in his last serious affair, with Roger Senhouse, Strachey’s bent for victimisation is apparent long before the cheerful allusions to being beaten and cut. Some of the correspondence with Senhouse is disturbing, but the letter that reports the after-effects of an experiment in ...”

“... on ‘Belief and Ritual’ is fascinating. Anyone who has read A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (2011), or Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen (1960), or even followed the Marvel Comics series Thor, will already know about Odin and Loki, fire giants, frost giants and the Midgard Serpent. But it’s astonishing how much of what we know comes from a single ...”

“... is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass ...”

“... ambiguity as well as ambition, with a premium on stealth as well as wealth. When Nigel, nephew of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, took on the job in 1126 (or thereabouts) he was simply called ‘the treasurer’. He resigned when made bishop of Ely in 1133 – not the sort of career progression to be expected these days. But the bishop of Salisbury, versatile in ...”

“... reality,’ one that is ‘far more permanent than the physical reality that surrounds us’. Roger Penrose, another unabashed Platonist, holds that the natural world is only a ‘shadow’ of a realm of eternal mathematical forms. The rationale for this otherwordly view appeared first in the Republic. Geometers, Plato observed, talk of perfectly round ...”

“... bear Iorek Byrnison. Lyra meets him in her journey north when she is trying to rescue her friend Roger from the General Oblation Board. Iorek’s ferocity and unshakeable instinct for what is true makes him morally terrifying in the way truly admirable creatures are: they make you a little afraid because there are no exceptions or exclusions, and you know ...”

“... and, if the neighbourhood did not make it socially pretty samey, then the outrageous price of the latte did. No one was smoking – it’s banned – and many of the customers were women. All of this makes the coffee house I go to a very different sort of place from those that proliferated in London from the middle of the 17th century; but ...”

“... was probably the nature of the thumb-sized toy encountered in 1267 by the Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon, who, with forgivable exaggeration, recorded a noise ‘exceeding the roar of strong thunder and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning’. Paper could also be wrapped around canvas compartments to add stages to a firework’s incandescent ...”

“... a bridge or shutting down a stretch of Oxford Street, as they did in 2019. Both Gail Bradbrook and Roger Hallam, two of the movement’s founding activists, have been exemplary arrestables. Arrests, they argue, are the necessary price for refusing a police order to move, and if enough people are detained, police stations and ...”

“... in the world at large, came to the Faculty in São Paulo: Lévi-Strauss, Braudel, Pierre Monbeig, Roger Bastide, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault. The deepest local imprint was left in philosophy, where a set of outstanding instructors trained a generation of thinkers, vividly memorialised in a recent work by Paulo Eduardo Arantes as Um Departamento Francês de ...”

“... a familiar voice, came snuffling at the door, expecting at this unsuitable hour to be taken out. Roger remarked, ‘Whatever happens, don’t get your life all mixed up with a dog’s.’ That is also stylish after its own fashion – a fashion that calls upon us compassionately to interpret the undertold tale. One’s first impression of Black Idol is of ...”

“... but says: ‘I believed simply that the acceptance of individual responsibility is the price we must all pay for living in a free society ... I was convinced ... that sooner or later, my one-time comrades would wish to sever themselves from any shred of allegiance to the Soviet Union.’ Blunt asked to talk to him for a few minutes alone before the ...”

“... claim to be civilised. A colonial Bloomsbury? There were common influences, to be sure – Roger Fry, as well as Moore – and some shared values. But Anderson was a Scot, we were Australians. We did not have the Bloomsbury tendency to preciousness: that is the last adjective one would think of applying either to Anderson or to those who learnt from ...”

“... no payment for his vast labours, but was allowed to buy copies of the finished work at the trade price. He professed to have no complaints on that score, but in other respects his experience with his publishers was unhappy. He disliked the practice of issuing the volumes as numbered parts of a series rather than as individual titles. He hated the ...”