“... which I had mistakenly supposed to be in honour of a thoroughgoing Tory figure. The first is by Robert Blake, himself an almost official Tory historian. Once more, ‘the missing telegrams’ concerning Chamberlain’s pre-knowledge of the Jameson Raid are displayed and the answer is decisive: Chamberlain knew and persistently deceived the House of ...”

“... gritting his teeth). In yet another, he is administering a severe ticking-off to an apprehensive Robert Macnamara. And on page 113 of the book there is a paragraph that – rather in the manner of a single human cell, which contains all the genetic information required to construct a complete picture of its owner – tells us a great deal about the ...”

“... family, part of the middling ranks of 18th-century society, the education of the young Thomas Robert, his friends and the development of his ideas till in 1805 he was an established figure, the author of the famous Essay on Population (by then in the sophisticated form of the later editions), a rector of the Church of England, professor at the new East ...”

“... associated with American documentary photography of this period (Gordon Parks’s protest shots, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Diane Arbus’s weirdos), wouldn’t be worth the film it was shot on – but it was different for Roy DeCarava. Hallway (1953) is a photo about nothing except a dark, empty corridor in a Harlem tenement: a quiet image that speaks ...”

“... of unsifted information is all quite riveting, in its slightly sick-making way, a bit like a Robert Ludlum thriller (or the ‘sweet, moist cakes’ Hitler gorged himself on during his final days underground), except everyone knows how it’s going to end. Hitler shot himself shortly after half past three on the afternoon of Monday 30 April 1945, and ...”

“... third, there is an infinite number of gradations.’ The new edition, which has an introduction by Robert Macfarlane, has an illustrated gate-post cover showing a variety of pebbles: a piece of amber from the Suffolk coast, a fragment of jet from the Yorkshire coast near Whitby. Nothing is static about a shoreline. Ancient glaciers made and carried colossal ...”

“... shining, uncomplicated, confident, bossy creatures, ‘free to play or free to slack’, as Robert Lowell put it, the ‘or’ multiplying their already monstrous freedom. They are always to hand with a nicely turned ‘filthy joke’ or two, the correct plural of ‘crocus’ (I always thought it was ‘crocuses’ myself, but then I’m not like ...”

“... a journey through time and never came back, and the final battle (or life itself) was too much for Robert Downey Jr (Iron Man). The last scene but one is his funeral, and the last scene of all is a glimpse of an aged Chris Evans (Captain America), who has had better luck, and is living with his old sweetheart retrieved from the 1970s. On the soundtrack we hear ...”

“... appliqué dress that nods to Picasso’s costumes for Parade makes the surrounding Sonia and Robert Delaunays seem ponderous; it’s hung on a plinth in the centre of the room, so that visitors have to walk around it – an imposing display for a dress that could never be commanding in the wild. Another homage to Picasso, a long-sleeved satin evening ...”

“... Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence did not make much difference to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (Robert Kennedy’s daughter), the Democratic candidate for Governor of Maryland. She lost. The Democrats, evidently thinking that to act like an opposition would cost them, lost. With the war party riding taller in the saddle than ever, it certainly feels like ...”

“... and greater speed it is in site-specific installations that the art pilgrimage stays alive. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) won’t come to you. You must, with some difficulty, go to them. The scale of the Hayward exhibition and the hermetic isolation of the installation give a good ...”

“... where the scene is instantly and plausibly interpreted for us. ‘The inanimate body of poor Robert was consigned to the white waters of the gulf … and I gazed out over the great waste of waters with a spirit that was indeed disconsolate.’ In the film we see the wake of the ship, the sack with the body floating in the gleaming water, but it doesn’t ...”

“... the movie is mostly about the way it looks. It’s meant to be a political thriller – based on Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost (the film has that title in the UK) – but it feels as if the writer went home halfway through, taking the story with him, and leaving the director and cinematographer to do what they could with the light and the setting. The ...”

“... dovetailed into another. Six watercolours of the Alban Hills, commissioned by Basset from John Robert Cozens, with their delicate shadows and elegiac evocations of scenes associated with Virgil and Ovid, represent the Arcadia of the Romantics, to be translated on landed estates into the English Picturesque. ‘George Legge’ by Pompeo Batoni ...”

“... a calamitous wrong call in endorsing the Nato intervention in March 2011. His defence secretary Robert Gates and, initially, Hillary Clinton both knew that it was against the American national interest to be drawn into another war with an Arab and Muslim country, but Obama listened to Susan Rice and Samantha Power and allowed himself to be panicked into ...”