“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... turns out to be an important asset. Grey complained bitterly when his father took a peerage; Lord Robert Cecil (as he then was) thought, when his elder brother’s death made him the heir to the marquessate, that his political career had been marred. Both hated leaving the Commons for the Lords; both benefited from the move. Salisbury would not have made a ...”

“... a story there can elude images left by Graham Greene, Carol Reed and the gifted cinematographer Robert Krasker. At one point Kerr goes out of his way to invite comparisons, introducing the very racket which damned Harry Lime, the black market in penicillin. He is not too shy to bring in Vienna’s four-man, four-nationality jeep patrol, made famous in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”