“... tabloid glare of celebrity visibility in a lurid image of Mick Jagger handcuffed to the art dealer Robert Fraser after a drugs bust; Warhol eliciting shock cut with indifference with a newswire photo of a car crash silk-screened 11 times across a rust-orange canvas; Richter producing an empathic response in his blurred representation of a pretty woman ...”

“... painted in Rome in 1622. The daughter of a Christian Circassian chieftain, she had married Robert Shirley in Persia and is shown draped in a kind of tent of gold fabric – the effect of her clothes is splendidly exotic. Her thin-lipped, quizzical half-smile is less contrived than those of many of the court beauties. Clothes like hers offer a break ...”

“... plans for a new Bedlam, since by the early 1800s the baroque palace of an asylum, designed by Robert Hooke, had fallen into serious disrepair. Matthews’s designs – elegant and neoclassical – were passed over, and the great grey superstructure of the new Bedlam arose at St George’s Fields in Southwark instead, topped off by the weirdly elongated ...”

“... shop-shelves, montages of violent action from Cuban history and the Spanish Civil War (including Robert Capa’s famous photo of a dying soldier). The base at Guantánamo Bay opens, or rather encloses itself. Sergio is confused. ‘Everything is the same,’ he says, looking around him. And then: ‘I have changed, and the city has changed.’ He quotes a ...”

“... and legs emerge. The impression of solidity was partly a matter of form. Like Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar created square, black and white images, typically using a Rolleiflex or the more sophisticated Hasselblad, plus tripod. The geometry of the square encourages a photographer to centre the subject and face it head on, turning unruly ...”

“... a scale model of which still stands in the grounds.A thousand years earlier, Paul of Caen and Robert the Mason began the transformation of the Roman shrine to St Alban, the first British Christian martyr, into a Norman church of handsome proportions, eventually dedicated in 1115. A succession of ambitious and not always scrupulous abbots and master masons ...”

“... Exposition Universelle, he expressed enthusiasm for British painting – for David Wilkie, Charles Robert Leslie and Francis Grant – and noted that the archaisms of the Pre-Raphaelites (the ‘école sèche’) had not inhibited their response to life and sentiment: he cited the Order of Release by Millais as something beyond the power of ‘nos ...”

“... of Northumbria in a child’s grave, Viking crosses with their round faces like a cowl. The dying Robert the Bruce came here on his last pilgrimage, hoping to find some time-crossing connection with the saint. Pilgrimages and festivals intertwine. There is a well-accepted anthropological framework for the festival process: the initial rites of separation from ...”

“... course from the Cleveland School of Cartooning – but he didn’t much care for the comparison. Robert Crumb, in his comic book Weirdo No. 7, which makes play with some of Guston’s motifs (the big eye, the soles of nailed boots) and has a narrative, ‘Uncle Bob’s Midlife Crisis’, in which he muses about taking up ‘a fine art career, oil painting ...”

“... organisation. He was reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority by the Conservative MP Robert Jenrick and the Campaign against Antisemitism, and is currently under investigation, despite the law making provision for such an application.On his return from Ireland, he was asked about Hamas but claimed client confidentiality. After his release, Ansari ...”

“... the year Clarke returned to Ireland, a book called Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, by Sir Robert Anderson, a police commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was ...”

“... more crazy if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. This is quoted in Robert Kee’s 1945 – The World We Fought For. Kee’s method is to construct an account of the year from contemporary newspapers and journals. Its vice is that it can look rather lazily tacked together. Its virtue is that it helps us to see events as the ...”

“... and privilege meet. This book has several faults but at least one great merit: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have seen that Misia’s personality, even if it can never quite be captured, remains highly interesting for the light it casts on how talent can cohabit with gracious living and yet still keep its distance. Misia features a good deal of ...”

“... at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there are errors in our account – given the habits of secrecy and misinformation which prevail among British governments it could perhaps hardly be otherwise – but what ...”

“... When Hotel Bedroom appeared in London, destined for the Venice Biennale, the catalogue essay by Robert Melville said of Freud, among many other offensive things: ‘in England we look upon him as the finest of our living primitives. His art has the exquisite laboriousness of Sunday painting relentlessly pursued throughout the week.’ When the critic and ...”