“... married an East India Company heiress in 1737, he acquired an estate in County Down, and his son Robert, Castlereagh’s father, married into the Anglican aristocracy. Castlereagh – also Robert Stewart – was largely raised by his Presbyterian grandparents, but educated ecumenically: first at the Anglican grammar school ...”

“... return. The demands of courtship were changed irrevocably by the rise of letter-writing. As Robert Darnton has argued, ‘living cannot be distinguished from reading, nor loving from the writing of love letters.’ Today, extramarital affairs are most likely to be discovered by reading a partner’s emails or texts. In fact, having an affair and using ...”

“... points. First, he notes that there is a horrible beauty in the forms of terror practised of late. Robert Oppenheimer was thrilled when he saw the bomb explode over Alamogordo, New Mexico, as were the pilots who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and some Japanese observers too, not forgetting the Islamic fundamentalists who were enraptured by the endlessly ...”

“... people violently and often and at such moments she was not silent, often in unexpected ways. When Robert Graves sold a copy of her book The Sleeping Beauty, which she had inscribed to him ‘in admiration’, she bought it back and resold it after adding: ‘I wrote this dedication at a time when Robert Graves was a ...”

“... to become a highly successful advocate and legal adviser to the crown. He attached himself to Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, the dashing royal favourite, who championed his cause and urged the queen to make him her attorney-general. When that office fell to his rival Edward Coke, he set his sights on the solicitor-generalship, but with an equal ...”

“... political behaviour, irrespective of changing ideology and institutions. Stalin’s biographer Robert Tucker was keen on the resemblance between Stalin and the most bloodthirsty of the 16th-century tsars, Ivan the Terrible, noting in Stalin in Power that Stalin, too, saw a resemblance, as witness his emotional response to Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible ...”

“... of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business ...”

“... for once. Scale is uncertain. ‘This might be nature – twenty stories high,’ to borrow from Robert Lowell: We two, one cell here, lie gazing into the ether’s crystal ball, sky and a sky, and sky, and sky, till death – Well – death and the void may be part of it. City parks by night do have something sepulchral about them. The little white blobs of ...”

“... as Belphoebe, Diana, a goddess supreme, never fully forgave him. Ralegh wrote a letter to Sir Robert Cecil from the Tower which was probably intended to be shown to the queen in order to win back her favour. The letter displays Ralegh at his best and worst. It’s a monstrous blast of self-pity, tempered by his characteristic half-belief in his own ...”

“... number of other members of the Movement for Democratic Change were arrested, tortured and beaten. Robert Mugabe had banned all MDC meetings and rallies in the hope of suppressing the MDC completely before this year’s elections. The local churches entered the fray and organised a prayer meeting in Highfield, a suburb of Harare. Tsvangirai drove to the ...”

“... aspire only to silence.’ A reply on a par with that of his near contemporary, the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who was once visited in the lunatic asylum to which he had retreated by a friend who asked how his work was coming along. ‘I’m not here to write,’ Walser replied, ‘but to be mad.’ Fénéon’s elusiveness infected the way others wrote ...”

“... included in Stranger Shores (2001), opens: ‘Born in the autumn years of the Habsburg Empire, Robert Musil served His Imperial and Royal Majesty in one bloody continental convulsion and died halfway through the even worse convulsion that followed.’ A Musil piece in Inner Workings, which takes up some material from the earlier essay ...”

“... dramatic events of the conflict: the battle of Teruel, when he, Hemingway and the photographer Robert Capa accompanied Republican forces during their heady initial victories; the siege of Barcelona, where ‘I and a million others saw things which Dante could not have imagined’; the Ebro fighting, when Hemingway saved Matthews’s life by preventing his ...”

“... spoke of his messiah complex and noted his ‘sharp eyes looking out of the same austere mask’. Robert Payne (a profound observer of wartime China, whose books are now forgotten) described Chiang’s face as ‘always the same: calm, detached, unemotional’. The problem has always been how to penetrate the mask. Early contemporaries speak of Chiang’s ...”

“... date. As I described in the LRB on 13 April 2000, the economists Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton drew on the log-normal distribution (and on a number of other assumptions about market conditions) to reduce the complicated problem of understanding the prices of options to a relatively simple differential equation. The work, published in ...”