“... letters to the worthies listed in Who’s Who, and that he managed to get money from the likes of Robert Maxwell, Cliff Richard and Twiggy. Since 1958 Butler had been the co-ordinator of a perennially impoverished study which began by examining the medical, social and economic circumstances of 17,000 babies born in the same week in March 1958, then over ...”

“... this systematically and over a period of time. Some time after Walsingham’s death, his colleague Robert Beale recalled that he had engaged ‘some’ of the secretaries in the French Embassy to betray the secrets of French and Scottish ‘dealings’, which was to say, the convolution at the heart of mid-Elizabethan politics: the question of Mary Queen of ...”

“... his siblings – made a fortune as a builder after Rome became the capital of a unified Italy. The young Roberto led the life of a playboy. He dropped out of high school and ‘spent money on cars, flowers, women and clothes’, Gallagher tells us. ‘He took twenty or thirty people to supper every night. A lot of money he gave away casually.’ Before he was ...”

“... of 1988, which read the work as determined by personal feeling, and the more scholarly accounts of Robert Ackerman and Hugh Lloyd-Jones which located her ‘at the heart’ of the (so-called) Cambridge Ritualists. Reluctant to offer an alternative myth, yet anxious to avoid already trampled ground, Beard instead explores Harrison’s formative years in ...”

“... visited or worked in the Loomis Laboratory included Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Robert Wood, E.O. Lawrence, George Kistiakowsky, Leo Szilárd, the Compton brothers (Arthur and Karl) and Albert Einstein. One newspaper columnist observed Loomis’s odd form of philanthropy: ‘In Tuxedo Park, his home, he has built the Loomis Laboratories, and ...”

“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

“... it was not Proust’s life I wanted to discover. I was passionately eager to know not when he met Robert de Montesquiou [one of the chief models for the Baron de Charlus], but when he met Swann, Charlus or Albertine.’ This perspective accounts for an apparent slip in his other book, where de Fallois writes of ‘three decisive events’ in Proust’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Oxford. When asked at their trial in April 1973 whether he was on the lookout for ‘coloured young men’, Ridgewell replied: ‘On the Northern Line I would agree with that.’ The case was thrown out because the judge, Gwyn Morris, had serious concerns about the conduct of Ridgewell’s squad (‘I find it terrible,’ he said, ‘that here in London ...”

“... an Edinburgh pavement: ‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.’ Her image as an ardent young woman graces the Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note. There’s a growing academic literature. Every year brings a stream of new tributes. A play performed at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre last year – Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed – captures the tenor ...”

“... a Bible in a tube of sunlight’. So, all right, there is no comma here – Morrison’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, said he was always inserting commas into her sentences and she was always taking them out again – but it is not so distinctive as the word ‘tube’. Thirty-four years ago, I stopped reading, right here, to puzzle whether this should be a ...”

“... Davidian, and rushed back to tell everyone. When Jones got to the compound, Koresh was talking to Robert Rodriguez, an ATF agent who had gone undercover as a Davidian. Rodriguez left the building and informed his superiors, but they decided to go ahead with the raid anyway. By the time the ATF team arrived at the compound at around 9.40 a.m., the Davidians ...”

“... system, or stardust. The electrical wires of the nerves, the mainframe of the brain. We start young: my train-obsessed three-year-old thinks of his digestive tract as a track, as if it were a series of signalling booths and stations. Why not? Is this metaphor any less apt than memory as data storage, or the immune system as besieged city? Something ...”

“... not actually married to K, has baby Nicolette, K going off to Balkans, now J falling in love with Robert Kee, who spends weekend at Ham Spray, F. Partridge approves,’ and so on. Sometimes it all seemed very distant and unimportant. And as for Frances Partridge’s approval, I think I would have gone a long way to avoid spending a weekend at Ham Spray (that ...”

“... clarified alarmingly the discourse around the question of homosexuality in the years we were too young to know much about it; by the time the Sexual Offences Act is passed, at the end of his second volume, we were thirteen. I know I was alert by then to the word ‘homosexual’ as it appeared in headlines, and disturbed by this bold-faced naming of a ...”