“... Feeling to the influence exerted on the apprentice songwriter Russell by poets such as Ginsberg, Robert Bly and Ezra Pound; William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley in particular inspired the ‘idea of using simple language to convey something very beautiful’. Russell also spoke about how he wanted his home-studio ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”