“... of which astronomy is a very good example, justifies itself to its paymasters in essentially self-imposed terms. Technical spin-offs are mentioned, but the pursuit of pure knowledge is obviously an activity worth supporting, and comets certainly do not figure large on a map increasingly dominated by the visually unexciting but theoretically compelling ...”

“... and Luttrell wrote nothing. The literary remains of ‘Conversation’ Sharp fill a small volume. Self-conscious attempts to record talk only wreck its spontaneity. In Genius in the Drawing-Room Robert Rosenstone’s essay describes the New York salon of Mabel Dodge which ran (if that’s what salons do) from 1912 to 1914 ...”

“... of Gilbert Pinfold is the only one who loved the poor mad writer. Such matters are outside his self-appointed limits. Davis allows that Waugh knew most of the story when he started a novel, but finds that he only discovers his deeper purpose as he writes. Thus he speaks of ‘Waugh’s growing understanding of his major themes as well as his plot’ when ...”

“... simpler way of saying what Keller wishes to say. After all, a certain musical isolation (partly self-inflicted, like Beethoven’s) was an important aspect in the shaping of Stravinsky’s individuality, and it is not unreasonable that he should have fought shy of close involvement with such a man as Schoenberg except through the channel of an ...”

“... of the editor. The disbandment of a team of highly-qualified journalists with the independence and self-confidence to carry out inquiries which might damage powerful people made Sunday Times staff still more subservient to the editor. Yoel Cohen shows in detail how, man for man and woman for woman, the investigative journalists on the Sunday Times in 1986 were ...”

“... of the captives of Lebanon, the George Harrison of the hostage scene, the other one. The reporter Robert Fisk has confessed to him how he failed to follow up a dubious tip-off about where he was being kept in 1988. When Keenan was held hostage in Beirut journalists found themselves asking what the story was. I am not referring to the international news splash ...”

“... don’t know exactly why, it probably alludes to the drama’s ritual, even sacrificial origins. Robert Cowan remarks that tragedy ‘was born under tyranny but flowered under democracy’, though Mitchell Greenberg notes that in the 17th century tragic theatre enjoyed a golden period in an age of political absolutism. It is also worth asking why the decline ...”

“... defiant statements (Byrd used his to proclaim his allegiance to the pope). McCarthy attributes his self-assurance in both the highest and the lowest musical styles of the day to the difficult trajectory of his career. ‘He did not merely survive constant change: it made him even more capable.’The scant biographical detail means that it is difficult to ...”

“... European empires, while many dreamed of an extra-European empire of their own. In 1684, Robert Barclay, an Aberdeenshire Quaker, founded his own settlement in east New Jersey; and in 1698, perhaps a quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital was expended on the Darien Scheme, an abortive attempt to establish a colony in Central America. After this ...”

“... corporations in Nitassinan as ‘colonialism’. In the early days of colonialism, as part of the self-justifying process of presenting subjugated races as inferior, eager scientists, intrepid explorers, shameless promoters and greedy businessmen – often one and the same person – found common interest in coercing or bribing ‘exotic’ natives to be put ...”

“... day when, as a boy fighting in the Russian Civil War, he killed (or thought he killed) a man in self-defence. The man was blond and handsome, on a beautiful white horse; the narrator was tired and ugly, riding a black nag. (Gazdanov’s protagonists often shared his characteristics. His fellow émigré Vasily Yanovsky described him as ‘a stocky fellow ...”

“... undemanding relationship with her erstwhile husband than of the ungovernable passion she felt for Robert. He rather relied on this passion keeping their marriage on more placid and companionable lines. When Tory worries about her son at boarding school, Bertram suggests they call the matron. ‘That “we” took a great burden from her. For so long she had ...”

“... Other club members preferred less gruesome explanations for the playwright’s brilliance. Robert Folkestone Williams, later to write a trilogy of biographical novels about Shakespeare – Shakespeare and His Friends, The Youth of Shakespeare and The Secret Passion – reverts to a less elaborate version of the Ovid-goes-to-Stratford manner in ‘A ...”

“... some curators in Europe. At the beginning of the practice known as ‘institutional critique’, Robert Smithson insisted that the artist must understand the apparatus he or she is ‘threaded through’ in order to challenge, if not to change, its operations. Today many artists are only too happy to be so threaded, and many curators only too eager to do the ...”

“... Robert Frost’s crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets everywhere. His whodunnit La Disparition (1969), a lipogram, was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994 ...”