“... MI5. Funds for upkeep and staff salaries were provided by Samuel Courtauld, who, with Lee and Sir Robert Witt, had recently founded the Courtauld Institute of Art. By 1935 it was clear that there was no realistic chance of a return to Hamburg in the foreseeable future. At this point Felix Warburg in New York began to press for the removal of the institute to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is to be held and done in common; nobody is to be unwillingly obeyed; in the sunlight of what Robert Burns called ‘social love’, human beings return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our ...”

“... 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ...”

“... House, survives. Burlington House was sold off to the government in the 1850s and modified by Robert Smirke, with what Pevsner called ‘high Victorian cruelty’, to house the Royal Academy. Charles Barry Jr and Robert Banks added the ranges that enclose the courtyard and house the Linnean, Geological and Astronomical ...”

“... Can historical biography still be written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him ...”

“... this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s dead. ’Oo is ’e? Robert: My spectre. I had one. Policeman: That’s unusual. I’ope you’re coming ...”

“... were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ...”

“... is to do more than merely exclaim about the fact.’ The ‘other Victorian’ is identified as Robert Browning, writing to his friend Julia Wedgwood: but it is in fact Julia Wedgwood, writing to her friend Robert Browning (it is also misquoted: ‘desire of an Immortality’, it should read, which makes a ...”

“... disclaimer later on. Her attempt to hand over the rights to the use of the Mandela name to Robert Brown, a Reaganite American businessman, brought her into headlong conflict with Nelson. All this highly erratic behaviour is a large political problem for the ANC, who would much prefer that she live the exemplary life of an Albertina Sisulu. Mrs ...”

“... Browning is in high favour once again, or promises to be. Has not A.S. Byatt, CBE, declared him ‘one of the very greatest English poets’? In a switch to fighting talk, she adds that ‘his greatness has never been fully acknowledged or described ... in part because he is difficult to docket in terms of the usual literary discussions of Victorian Poetry ...”

“... mood, denouncing orators who gesticulate so wildly that it is scarcely safe to stand behind them. Robert Muchembled discovers almost the same degree of formality among Breton peasants as Maria Bogucka does among Polish courtiers and diplomats. I liked her account of a ‘farewell ceremony’ in 18th-century Poland. ‘A certain Miss Szamowska saying goodbye ...”

“... tackled two generations of remarkable Drysdales and their partners: George, his brother Charles Robert, the latter’s mistress and intellectual colleague Alice Vickery, their son Charles Vickery Drysdale, and his wife Bessie. And when I saw the proofs I realised that she had indeed researched her subject profoundly. Her discoveries about the personal life ...”

“... 1938, Hahn wrote a letter to Meitner reporting this puzzling result. She and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, who later became professor of what the local Cambridge paper called Unclear Physics, realised that the uranium nucleus had split in two with the release of a prodigious amount of energy, and first coined the term ‘nuclear fission’. In April ...”

“... historian’s task, in the very subjects it studies, Venturi’s history could not be more unlike Robert Darnton’s new book. Venturi is interested in how great events were understood by great, or at least highly articulate, minds. Darnton is concerned with apparently insignificant events – not the American Revolution but a slaughter of cats – and in ...”