“... When​ the Courtauld Institute of Art moved in 1989 from a house designed by Robert Adam in Portman Square to a wing of Somerset House, William Chambers’s masterpiece, it seemed a very satisfactory solution, especially because it provided an opportunity for the Courtauld Gallery to join the institute in its new premises ...”

“... When is a disease not a disease? No quibbling academic riddle this, but a problem increasingly pressing upon medical practice and ethics alike. So many questions crowd in. Is it valid to talk of a person being ill without a disease, or having a disease without being sick? When and how do we draw dividing-lines between conditions, disabilities and abnormalities, on the one hand, and diseases, on the other? This can be a crucial issue when it comes to final authority in deciding the fate of severely-malformed babies ...”

“... savoured of art or taste was excluded. In the studio which Coldstream shared with Graham Bell in Robert Street off the Hampstead Road ‘art’ had become a dirty word, though the depth of bitterness was reserved for the word ‘artistic’. Coldstream’s time at the GPO Film Unit was coming to an end, but his association with John Grierson had a lasting ...”

“... problematic glare of celebrity, Swingeing London 67 (1968), his lurid painting of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser (an art dealer of the time) manacled together in a police van after a drug bust. We tend to see Pop artists as utterly seduced by images of personages and products, complicit with the amnesia that consumerism needs to produce. Yet sometimes, against ...”

“... hats and very bad prints of Rod Stewart. The visitor whose expectations have been formed by Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro of 1764, may feel momentarily taken aback, but in essence nothing has changed for the palace is not in the city, the city is in the palace and it has been there, growing and adapting, for ...”

“... at the New Arts Laboratory in 1970 and of the sci-fi inflected essays of the land artist Robert Smithson, who in 1967 described post-industrial New Jersey as ‘a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass’. In The Asset Strippers, the machines are lying idle but there’s a cunning relay between the ruins of the recent past ...”

“... the pulse of continuity in European literatures from Caxton and Boccaccio to Rilke, Valéry and Robert Lowell. For Carne-Ross, the continuities and echo-densities which relate Pindar to Ezra Pound, which make Leopardi stylise a scene in the exact light of Horace, which provide Ariosto and Gongora with stylistically diverse but equally dynamic relations to ...”

“... of the ordeal determined by the weather and the tightness of the bindings. In Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves remembers seeing his faithful servant, Private Fahy, spreadeagled on a wheel. ‘Tottie’, as he was known, got ‘28 days of it’ for drunkenness. Downey had been clobbered with the full ‘84 days’ on 25 November, a few weeks before he was ...”

“... used in polonium manufacture in the 1940s have not changed in their fundamentals. In 1943, Robert Oppenheimer assigned its production to Charles Thomas, central research director of the Monsanto chemical company. He set up a laboratory in the indoor tennis court of his mother-in-law’s large and remote estate in Dayton, Ohio. The polonium was made by ...”

“... and thought a lot about the nature of art and how it might be taught, and in his catalogue essay Robert Kudielka turns to the writings for explanations. In hers, Bridget Riley tells how they have informed her own thinking about abstract painting. Yet despite its aphoristic power (the expression ‘taking a line for a walk’ suggests so much about drawing ...”

“... inclinations. He found a partner, David Ball – also an assistant and a model. In the 1980s Robert Mapplethorpe was one of those much taken with McBean’s photographs of him. He died in 1990, on his 86th birthday. He had come out of retirement from time to time to work for smart magazines, but on the evidence of this exhibition colour did not suit his ...”

“... books of the Eighties have been American, and ‘excellence’ is their creed. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Junior’s In Search of Excellence1 appeared in 1982 and it quickly established itself as the best-selling management book ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter era. Excellence ...”

“... the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a proud Amazon, armoured and helmeted, repulsing European foes and civilising barbarians is, these days, according to ...”

“... go to Paris.’ The children’s religious education divided along gender lines. The boys (except Robert) were never as devout as the girls. When Rose told five-year-old Jack that attending first Friday Mass for nine months assured a ‘happy death’, he said he would rather pray for ‘two dogs’. Joe Jr and Jack both started at Dexter, an exclusive ...”

“... Boydell launched his Shakespeare Gallery, commissioning artists to paint scenes from the plays; Robert Bowyer opened a gallery of paintings illustrating scenes from Hume’s History of England. These and other such ventures were to be funded both by exhibiting the paintings themselves and engraving them for sale, whether as prints to be framed or as book ...”