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“... disappeared as it has been surrounded and overlaid by successive Chinese visions of the modern. Robert Barnett’s experience of Lhasa does not go back as far as the Dalai Lama’s memory: he first visited in 1987, as a tourist on a not very profound search for enlightenment. He never got to the cave where he had planned a week of ...”

“... or Lhasa, and Amdowan Tibetans still speak a dialect that is barely understood in Lhasa. As Robert Barnett explains in his extensive introduction, they bowed to the holy city of Lhasa, but ran their own temporal affairs, negotiating the shifting tribal and clan allegiances, and accepting obligations and protection from local religious figures. When ...”

“... Brexit vote lay with either economic privation or cultural loss. In The Lure of Greatness, Anthony Barnett, the founder of Charter 88 and co-founder of Open Democracy, has identified a third: the constitution. Those who focus on the economic explanation, for Brexit as for the election of Donald Trump, point to the increasing disparity between rich and poor on ...”

“... of stylistic precedence and traditional modes of expression are common to both. In the case of Robert Hughes, author of the monumental American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, the artist of choice would be John Singer Sargent, brilliant pictorial chronicler of the beau monde of the 19th century. Like Sargent, Hughes is a brilliant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Tulians had any doubts about the defendants’ guilt. The head of the Chamber of Commerce, Lana Barnett, was blunt: ‘We know these people; we grew up with them. And we know what they sell.’ If anything, Blakeslee writes, ‘Barnett felt the system was stacked in the defendants’ favour. She resented her tax dollars ...”

“... the People in their rucksacks. Primus inter people is the founding director of Charter 88, Anthony Barnett, whose book attempts to recapture for his constitutionalist tendency the drama of ‘our constitutional revolution’: ‘“we the people” – to use a long-coined phrase that may finally become currency in Britain – have changed, especially in our ...”

“... of mass destruction – didn’t appear for another 25 years. And on the day of the explosion Robert Peary’s crew were in New York, where they stayed for another week before embarking for Ellesmere Island. The biggest question, though, as Pynchon’s Professor Vanderjuice notes, is why on earth Tesla would have wanted to do such a thing: ‘Did Tesla ...”

“... era ruled. In this desert of greed, vanity and corruption one could always rely on the tonic of Robert Hughes pieces in Time and the New York Review of Books, now collected. He lays about him splendidly, not sparing any link in the chain that tethers artists to their time, from the studio to the dealers and their pimps, and to the final rings in the ...”

“... small Sandemanian congregation, founded by the dissenting Dundonian John Glas and his son-in-law Robert Sandeman, lived by a plain – one might say, ‘empiricist’ – reading of Scripture. They preached brotherhood and purity, which in Faraday’s case at least did not preclude moderate drinking and trips to the theatre, and after Sunday morning services ...”

“... to solder their cause together with appeals to colour-blind communism and pan-Africanism. As Robert Vitalis notes in his book White World Order, Black Power Politics, Black Internationalism was born alongside the white chauvinist version of international relations at the end of the 19th century, when ‘international relations meant race ...”

“... David Robert Jones, alias David Bowie, is now in his 40th year. His creepy, chilling phrases pop out of pub jukeboxes, and extracts from his movies catch the eye on pub videos, whether he is embracing a Chinese girl or being executed by Japanese soldiers; his image appears in the Sunday-paper magazines, artistically displayed in sundry poses ...”

“... its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson loved more than any other: ‘The Birks of ...”

“... effect is far even from that of work by artists Flavin admired and makes a bow to, like Tatlin and Barnett Newman. (He did one arrangement of yellow, red and blue fluorescent light to commemorate the ‘simple problem’ posed by the title of Newman’s series of paintings, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.) Try to separate shape and colour, geometry and ...”

“... He has created​ more than any artist after Picasso,’ Jasper Johns said of Robert Rauschenberg, his one-time partner, and the Rauschenberg retrospective now at Tate Modern (until 2 April) fully attests to the sheer abundance of his six-decade career (he died in 2008). There are impressive inventions here, such as his extravagant combinations of painting, collage and sculpture, as well as mixed experiments, such as his rambunctious forays into new media technologies, but there is a lot of recycling and wheel-spinning too ...”