“... recipients are now well trained. Which is why America’s Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its first ...”

“... depiction of Cameron in The Death of the Heart (1938), make of the characterisation of himself as Robert, the crypto-Nazi spy whose loyalty his lover Stella is gradually forced to question as the story unfolds until, at the end, unmasked, he falls or jumps to his death from the roof of her house? Much of what Bowen put into her letters of what she wanted to ...”

“... religious reformer George Rapp, and purchased in 1825 by the most celebrated of the new utopians, Robert Owen, whose ‘Villages of Unity and Mutual Co-operation’, where inequality, private property and organised religion were to be banished for ever, were typical of the American Utopia. Their members had, as Kumar says, been convinced ‘that, if the world ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... stand the test of time? An account that pays more attention to the how and less to the why? Enter Robert Darnton, the author of a dozen major books on Ancien Régime France. Darnton is not averse to theory. His work bears, lightly but discernibly, the imprint of his collaboration with the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, with whom he taught a seminar ...”

“... adds to a 75-year pile-up of biographies, movies, novels and documentaries. Writers including Robert Penn Warren and Sinclair Lewis (All the King’s Men and It Can’t Happen Here); the directors Robert Rossen, Ken Burns and Stephen Zaillian; and the actors John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish ...”

“... Wotton’s ambitions were quickly stalled by the penurious caution of James’s ministers, notably Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, as well as by the ‘calcified habits’ of Venice’s ruling gerontocracy. Meanwhile French diplomatic intervention quietly accomplished a peaceable resolution of the dispute, with the papal interdict lifted in April 1607.The ...”

“... funeral took place before the report came in, and, as the ceremony was ending, a man called Robert Burns – Shirley Ann’s uncle – took out a Beretta and shot the reverend three times in the head. There was no insurance, but Radney was quick to see fresh opportunities. Burns had done what half the town dreamed of doing, and few people wanted to see ...”

“... parts of the mind, yet as they emerge from that promising condition where they are still, in Robert Frost’s words, ‘a lump in the throat, a homesickness, a lovesickness’, they depend for safe passage not only upon instinctive tacts but upon literary awarenesses, upon an ear that is more or less cultivated as well being naturally sensitive. During ...”

“... in the past decade. Four enormous corporations – headed by the late Roy Thomson, Rupert Murdoch, Robert Anderson and ‘Tiny’ Rowland – have been involved in their rescue. And without the intervention of firms of this size, these papers would already be dead. It is unlikely, however, that giant corporations can play the role of publishers of papers of ...”

“... the fact that anti-monumentality was precisely what the New York minimalists – sculptors like Robert Morris, Richard Serra and Donald Judd – so polemically espoused. As Morris put it, they were bent on making neither objects nor monuments. Their art sought an in-between condition, a size, shape and presence intelligible only in the way a work ...”

“... effects, just convincing enough to make Picasso’s Charnel House or a group of mirrored cubes by Robert Morris seem not quite right. The combination of ‘real’ footage, digital effects and a complexly motile camera makes for seductive and startling effects, as the ghosts of exhibitions and installations past appear and swiftly vanish. There’s some ...”

“... of the US army, as it advanced across Europe in 1944, were Rolleiflexes. Contemporaries such as Robert Capa would have found that decision insane – almost as insane as joining the advance in the first place, given that Miller was a former fashion model who never wore the same outfit for more than a few hours. She was also a hypochondriac. Her colleague ...”

“... terrorists by the same method. Streep appears again in Lions for Lambs (2007), directed by Robert Redford, another decent liberal movie but interminably talky. She is a long-time journalist interviewing Tom Cruise as the rising star of the uncertain Republican Party. Redford is a weary but devoted college professor trying to awaken idealism in what he ...”

“... in the 18th century. The drawings are gathered together in The Four Books on Architecture (Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield’s 1997 translation is the most recent), which are still a source for modern architects. Palladio’s origins may explain his books’ directness. He worked with his hands – he was a stone carver until he was 30 years old ...”