“... It offered the vacant throne to William and Mary. What if James returned? Isaac Newton consulted Robert Sawyer, the distinguished lawyer who, with him, represented Cambridge University in the Convention, and received the reassuring advice that to oppose a de facto king, even if on behalf of a lawful king, was treason. But James’s attempt to regain his ...”

“... in a Ship, as well as in the State’). A good woman was ‘like a ship’, the preacher Robert Wilkinson ventured, because ‘her countenance and conversation are ballasted with soberness and gravity’ – though she ‘must not have one quality of a ship, and that is too much rigging’.Beneath the bluster, however, was hard-nosed calculation. A ...”

“... being given by Jones on ‘Early Female Sexuality’ and Joan Riviere, and those from Vienna by Robert Waelder. In June 1938, the Nazi annexation of Austria forced Freud and his family to flee to London, whither they had been preceded by a number of Berlin analysts. (Most of the Viennese analysts went on to America; only Willi and Hedwig Hoffer settled in ...”

“... relation between reason and unreason in this area. A recent and distinguished contribution is Robert Parker’s essay on pollution and purification, Miasma. One main feature of this research has been its invocation of comparative anthropology and sociology: not only ancient texts and remains but also the findings of modern fieldworkers have been adduced ...”

“... and for a new centrist political party appears to have been driven by her infatuation with Lord Robert Cecil (Holmes doesn’t make entirely clear whether this was romantic). ‘I do not approve of extremes in politics,’ she wrote. ‘I distrust Revolution on the one hand and Reaction on the other, and I believe we ought to pursue a middle course.’ She ...”

“... Opponents of this analysis – notably Matthew Goodwin, whose Revolt on the Right (written with Robert Ford) first identified Ukip voters as older and poorer than the general population – argue that the Leave/Remain faultline is essentially a cultural one. Among working-class voters identified as former or potential Labour supporters, the divisive issue ...”

“... have no idea what it contains. In the 17th century, it was in the possession of the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly ...”

“... Yusuf Sayigh on the Arab economies, of Abdullah Bujra on South Yemen, of Hannah Batatu on Iraq, of Robert Graham on Iran, of John Townsend on Oman, of John Duke Anthony on the Amirates, are serious and balanced studies based on first-hand research that try to grapple with the reality of these countries. By contrast, Mr Kelly’s is, for all its length, a ...”

“... and cosy corner-shop atmosphere: exterminate and replace them. The mastermind behind Crown was Robert Haft, a Harvard Business School graduate who had written his master’s thesis on retail discounting. Crown’s philosophy, as displayed on South Lake, was predatory. Find an existing profitable outlet, set up alongside it, discount the neighbour into ...”

“... Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Wölfli, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes. Or if Robert Crumb had turned into his obsessive mad-genius brother, Charles Crumb. If thisweredrawn byKirby inthe 1970sit wouldbe a massivegleaminghystericallyhyperarticulatedpsychedelicedifice ...”

“... most notoriously violent moment. The period has been much written about in the forty years since Robert Conquest made the Soviet 1930s synonymous with the Great Terror. Scholarship on prewar Stalinism has bifurcated. On the one hand, studies of the Terror have become more detailed and nuanced. Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, it seems that the ...”

“... Suffering from crippling pains in the head and advancing paranoia, he conceived a vendetta against Robert Peel, then prime minister, bought pistols, travelled to London and, though apparently intending to assassinate Peel, fatally shot his private secretary Edward Drummond. ‘The Tories in my native city have compelled me to do this,’ he claimed in ...”

“... in the quantum mechanics enthusiasm of several of the brilliant young scientists – they included Robert Oppenheimer, Pascual Jordan and Victor Weisskopf – who had come to the university to pursue the new theory. ‘I learned at an early age that science is a haven for the timid, the freaks, the misfits,’ Delbrück later mused: ‘If you were a student in ...”

“... water on the side of a narrow-boat during a family holiday with another Tory MP, the somewhat wet Robert Atkins. During that trip he asked Mr Atkins point blank whether there was any realistic possibility of him becoming prime minister. Anderson records that the two men decided there and then that there was, but that his best tactic was to avoid being ...”

“... Malcolm Yorke says more about ‘excesses of amorous nature’ than friends and disciples do (like Robert Speaight, whose biography came out in 1966), in whose hands his reputation has largely rested. The very presence of a woman was a temptation and incitement: he had Ayatollah-like ideas about women’s clothing – perhaps a reflection of his ...”