“... is a woolly conceit, almost a faith. Proof isn’t required. A Brighton film of two years earlier, Robert Hamer’s delightfully sinister Pink String and Sealing Wax, set, to judge by the costumes, in the 1880s, does indeed have ‘Victorianism’ written all over it, as does Hamer’s subsequent Kind Hearts and Coronets. But neither of these is scrutinised by ...”

“... racism. Her father is a preacher in Memphis; Jack’s father is a preacher in Iowa: he is the Robert Boughton we’re introduced to in Gilead (2004), the first novel in the series, the broken-hearted apologist for his irredeemably wayward son. The fact that the characters live on either side of a racial divide is less important to their conversation in ...”

“... to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy derived from the paternal authority that Adam and subsequent biblical fathers exercised over their families and servants.More recently, scholars have slightly qualified Laslett’s findings, pushing the ...”

“... Not while Rupert’s still around. And while Rupert’s still around (and Sir James, and Robert, and Tiny – and maybe even Victor: ‘I have the papers in which to give my views, but I think the House of Lords will be better’), reports of the ‘death of the press barons’ are somewhat exaggerated. The British certainly like to give the ...”

“... always foredoomed, because the corrected spin never has equal impetus with the original. Consider Robert Graves’s attempt to revise Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam. The AV is peculiar, even so: for no magister can be detected, among King James’s translators. Ward Allen’s researches in Alabama, and Gerald Hammond’s in Manchester, have not turned up any ...”

“... One theme of this book is that there are significant psychological differences between the sexes.’ The trouble is that from where we are standing the task of distinguishing differences which are or might be programmed, differences due to learning, and differences which are not differences but stereotypes is not operationally feasible. Dr May does not attempt it ...”

“... figures take up only half the picture surface. In the Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera ‘Robert le Diable’ the figures on stage are unfocused, ghostly white-sheeted nuns. They are broadly painted and form a pale band across the canvas; moonlight drifts through the round arches of the set; the strongest highlights are a splash of white seen through ...”

“... translation.’ In a recent interview Sato directs the reader to Nabokov’s savage demolition of Robert Lowell’s ‘adaptation’ of a Mandelstam poem: ‘“Adapted” to what? To the needs of an idiot audience? To the demands of good taste? To the level of one’s own genius?’ Although Sato’s translations have occasionally been criticised as ...”

“... warrior who would have redeemed Britain’s honour. ‘Prince Henry on Horseback’ by Robert Peake the Elder (c.1606-08). The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition (until 13 January), which is scholarly in detail and spectacular to view, is an attempt to rediscover the truth behind the later myths. What it largely reveals is an earlier set of ...”

“... From August Sander’s portraits of German types, labelled degenerate by the Nazis, to Robert Frank’s photographs of a sadder, rougher USA than the picture magazines showed, to Richard Avedon’s pictures of Westerners who were odder and stranger physically, and maybe mentally, than local pride allowed to be possible, and Diane Arbus’s freakish ...”

“... James I, ‘took a little Mislike’ to it and it fizzled out. Charles I made the antiquary Robert Cotton close his famous library, thinking it seditious. Suspected at various times of anti-Stuart sympathies, closet Catholicism, republicanism, even as late as 1797 the antiquaries could be denounced by George III as a ‘Popish cabal’. Still, they ...”

“... them. To be fair, not all the faces are dull. Some of the later portraits, for example that of Mrs Robert Sandilands, remind you that projection of character – they almost bring David to mind – can be achieved without Gainsborough-style feathered brushwork, or Hals-style slashes. Batoni, like many portrait painters with other strings to their bow, believed ...”

“... a flashback, because it returns about a third of the way through the catch-up tale. We see Mickey (Robert Pattinson) and a crowd of other people seeking to be chosen for an expedition that will take them away from Earth. Mickey and a friend have a particular need to be elsewhere in order to escape being murdered by the gangs to whom they owe money. Some of ...”

“... a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The Central Intelligence Agency was caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s ...”

“... was relieved that she had chosen a reasonably promising young man whose family he knew. Mosley, Robert Cecil reported to Curzon, was ‘not in the first flight’ but had ‘a good future before him’. He was two years older than Cimmie; very dashing (though Curzon at once remarked on his ‘rather Jewish appearance’), and the youngest MP in the ...”