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“... and utter strangers in the counties’. The grasping sheriff of Nottingham in the 14th-century Robin Hood legend was not a purely fictional creation. In Articles 50 and 51 of Magna Carta, the barons promise to remove from the kingdom Philip Marc, the sheriff of Nottingham, and his kinsmen, along with all other alien knights ‘who have come with horses and ...”

“... and Science, and both journals made a big splash of the findings in editorials and commentaries. Robin Weiss’s piece in Nature was headed ‘Polio vaccines exonerated’, as if the safety of all such vaccines were in question, and ended with the claim that ‘some beautiful facts have destroyed an ugly theory.’ Weiss wrongly stated that the samples had ...”

“... wrote to Asquith, ‘than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’ This is quoted in Robin Prior’s excellent Gallipoli: The End of the Myth, whose conclusion is that that whole enterprise was hopeless from the start; the ‘myth’ in the subtitle is the common illusion that if things had gone a little differently it might have ...”

“... to name, with an influence extending far beyond the telephone kiosk. For some critics (such as Robin Middleton, in John Soane, Architect) Soane’s wholly unclassical handling of space makes his work the ultimate origin of architectural Modernism; others, stressing his playful pastiche of classical Order, see him instead as the fountainhead of ...”

“... on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the French. Chubby, chummy and balding, imperturbably good-humoured and everybody’s pal, Inglis has a distinct resemblance to Bob Hoskins, the interfering ...”

“... deductive powers and a desire for social justice’, from the Lone Ranger and Tonto to Batman and Robin. Rex Stout’s creation Nero Wolfe, at least, has no desire for social justice – his amorality, never quite proven nor quite going away, being one reason for the richness and rereadability of the books. In other ways he fits the pattern. He and Archie ...”

“... from swingeing losses: the shares of Lloyds and RBS are now worth a tiny fraction of their value prior to the crisis. But because of the bailouts, those who lent to banks in Europe and the US have generally got their money back. Because investors have reason to hope this will continue to be the case, they are prepared to lend banks money on terms far more ...”

“... It is of course a picture of the rise of Christianity which has taken quite a beating recently. Robin Lane Fox has shown that early Christianity was really a very middle-class affair. Nietzsche dedicated Human All Too Human – admittedly in one of his spasmodic reactions against Schopenhauer – to Voltaire, saint of the Enlightenment. The connection ...”

“... Ransome’s dictionary but wasn’t sure how it was spelled). They had names that defied gender: Robin, Bobby, Troy and some, like Tiffany, Page and Kirby, that in Mrs Ransome’s book weren’t names at all. The presenters and their audience spoke in a language which Mrs Ransome, to begin with anyway, found hard to understand, talking of ‘parenting’ and ...”

“... every issue raised by the action group, but it was never enough; they bombarded us with round-robin emails and to my knowledge we tried to keep on top of them. It’s not easy when the TMO had 6500 other social tenants and 2500 leaseholders to help in the borough. But this Grenfell group was political. They hated everything the council and the TMO did, no ...”