“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sunset was never exactly a paragon of family values. A boy in the 1950s, the heyday of the genre, Robert Pippin grew up steeped in the Western. He watched them both on television (his favourite show was Have Gun, Will Travel) and ‘all day Saturdays at the movies (ten in the morning until six at night) … one Western after another’. Growing up in Havana ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he strikes in the phrase ‘deliberately excluded from ...”

“... newspaper pundits have created persistent legends; and it is to combat one of these legends that Robert Ferrell has edited Eisenhower’s diaries. Professor Ferrell is not the first historian who has sought to show that the General-President, far from being a confused nonentity, was, on the contrary, a hard-working, shrewd and purposive leader who ...”