“... 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 ...”

“... the 19th-century novel itself is perhaps the most important. As Pew and Silver tell it, Robert Louis Stevenson visits Dark at the lighthouse and gets drunkenly loquacious on the subject of man’s shadowy inner self. When Dark discovers an evolutionist’s treasure trove of fossils, he becomes the embodiment of post-Darwinian angst, and Darwin ...”

“... on the label, rather than the issue of size’). He flies to New York to interview Robert Atkins a few weeks before Atkins dies of a heart attack. He visits a McCain chip factory and stands on a platform poised over a vat of bubbling fat to watch a chip taster at work, his ‘small bright eyes darting around his large, pasty face’. He also ...”

“... before he knew that the FBI had seized all Black’s hard disks: Deedes, indeed, is a bit like Robert Graves’s Claudius, surviving every situation while more powerful figures are pole-axed all around him because he plays the buffoon so successfully that no one can see in him a future emperor. Born in 1913, Deedes grew up in a castle that was sold off for ...”

“... 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 and was ‘the most famous, and no doubt the most interesting salon in American history’. Mabel Dodge liked to assemble celebrities ...”

“... of recent philosophical writers in this area whose achievement Dr Küng feels free to overlook: Robert M. Adams, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Terence Penelhum, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross and Richard Swinburne, for example, have all made contributions far too substantial to be thus ignored. Dr Küng’s enormous apparatus of bibliography and references gives ...”

“... were more and more professionally organised, and more and more separate from their public. Robert Peel complained in the 1840s about the difficulty of justifying government support for astronomy to a Parliament of country gentlemen. Science was specialised, divided, demarcated. At the same time Peel’s problems could have been solved by keeping the ...”

“... versions: ‘A good many began singing. Spirits rose. Glasses were brought out and filled’ (Robert Baldick, 1964); ‘Many sang songs. They were jolly together. They offered one another a drop to drink’ (Helen Constantine, 2016); ‘Many sang. Spirits rose, and glasses were produced and filled’ (Anthony Goldsmith, 1947); ‘There was singing and ...”

“... English political nation a great deal, but in 1603 the skilful diplomacy of her chief minister, Robert Cecil, escorted James VI, King of Scots, to the thrones of England and Ireland, with far less fuss than everyone had feared. The entire archipelago was for the first time in its history united under a single monarch, and moreover under the ruler of the ...”

“... finding somewhere on the South Island a bit like ‘the Lake District’. The man who catches her, Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire and former CEO of a drone manufacturer, shuttles between disguises of his own: doomsday prepper, wannabe media baron, and, on occasion, an imaginary commanding officer at the CIA’s Special Operations Group called Lt Col ...”

“... in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), and then, after the Brexit referendum in 2016, by what Robert Crowcroft describes as a ‘contest’, ostensibly between proponents of popular and parliamentary sovereignty, ‘to make up the rules under which the country was governed’, though in truth the constitution provided ‘little more than a fig leaf’ for ...”

“... judgment of many, including the historian Kai Bird in The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (2014), that Salameh was murdered not just because of Munich, but also because his close relationship with the CIA made him a point of contact between Washington and the PLO, a connection not at all to Israel’s liking. The​ existence of the Club ...”

“... have remained close to her father-in-law. Nancy, herself an artist and textile designer, married Robert Graves, with whom she had four children, before that marriage also collapsed; Christopher, the youngest of the four, became an architect, a member of the Modernist MARS group and husband of the textile designer E.Q. Myers. Nicholson’s legacy is threaded ...”

“... a public museum, so Helen took inspiration from an example encountered in London: the library of Robert Witt, whose collection of photographs of paintings would later become the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute. For the FARL, Helen commissioned photographers to document objects in churches, private collections and other obscure places throughout ...”

“... but it’s also about listening to an unassuming conference attendee recount a story about meeting Robert Pattinson (‘I’d faint if he tried to buy me a drink,’ another academic chimes in). Trip​ has a lightness that Barrodale’s short stories sometimes lack. You Are Having a Good Time shows signs of its age. There’s a blurb from the now disgraced ...”