“... 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 ...”

“... act and to be responsible for their actions is an essential aspect of who they are), and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) leading the yeses (he’s just had a difficult encounter with the mother of a young man they accidentally killed in a preceding film). Both are reasonable positions, and we may, according to our own politics, think either is confirmed or denied ...”

“... musing on the lights below, soft-focus studio filter work, the glow and heartening realism of Robert Doisneau (industrial suburbs, the great aerial one of the Renault plant beside the Bois de Boulogne, pensioners, tramps, young lovers in a park, a kiss at rush-hour or a dance in the dark); and on the history shelves the wartime books, old coats and ...”

“... theatrical staging, a tableau vivant, which cannot but call to mind the ‘theatre of cruelty’, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, scenes from David Lynch movies. This brings us to the crux of the matter. Anyone acquainted with the US way of life will have recognised in the photographs the obscene underside of US popular culture. You can find similar ...”

“... in the years up to 1917, before the arrival of British troops, by German archaeologists led by Robert Koldewey. The perspective drawings suggest something closer to a modern town planner’s ideas than to the crowded souks and tenements that one imagines, on the evidence of old Istanbul or Fez. But all ages, whatever their evidence, manage to give ...”

“... a jagged strip of canvas left bare at the top. It’s reminiscent of Clyfford Still, or one of Robert Motherwell’s blue paintings: the old Abstract Expressionist elite, New York’s first artistic avant-garde, are seldom far from Basquiat’s large-scale works. His favourite painter, apart from Cy Twombly, was Franz Kline. But, as in Twombly’s ...”

“... found a suitable home, when the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing opened. The space, designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, isn’t quite the ecclesiastical setting for which the artwork was made, but it comes surprisingly close: high ceilings with simplified apses, top-lighting and pale grey walls with dados made of grey pietra serena. Almost ...”

“... Or is the truth to be found in the nuanced available light of René Burri, Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa? ‘Truth’ not just in the sense of true to appearances. Are human beings like Weegee’s excited grinning bystanders? Or are they like Cartier-Bresson’s self-contained passers-by? They could of course be all these things, but maybe they are none ...”

“... with him usually agree that he was the most engaged and patient looker at art they ever knew. Robert Rosenblum rightly says, in David Sylvester: The Private Collection, that there was something comical about his high seriousness, but it is also true that, ‘unlike the rest of us ironists’, he could make one feel (or at least feel one ought to ...”

“... well-known fact that all a working man would ever do with a large award of damages was buy a pub. Robert Stevens in a footnote cites a nice antidote from a law lord in 1833: ‘Here is a contract made by a fishmonger and a carrier of fish who know their business, and whether it is just and reasonable is to be settled by me who am neither fishmonger nor ...”