“... of Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and ...”

“... calls one chapter ‘The Forgotten Bestsellers of Early English Fiction’, with a glance at Robert Darnton’s Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, but in a spirit of grim retrieval instead of heartfelt recuperation. The thriving subgenre of ‘ramble novels’ with titles like Adventures of a Rake and Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse has ...”

“... He served as the director of the Theoretical Division at wartime Los Alamos, reporting directly to Robert Oppenheimer. After the war, he returned to Cornell, but he remained active as a consultant to the nuclear weapons programme, as well as to the budding nuclear power industry. In 1947, Bethe was asked to tackle the problem of shielding for nuclear ...”

“... who have conventionally been regarded, with Suckling and Carew, as principal ‘Cavalier’ poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for regicide, doing in the book? Why do we ...”

“... Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia’s self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second edition of his book Mill and Liberalism (1963), he remembered with delight that one of its original reviewers had ‘obligingly’ described it as ‘“dangerous and unpleasant”, which was what it was intended to be ...”

“... humiliators rather than the humiliated, to ‘convert trauma into triumph’ (in the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller’s terms), to transform the trauma of vulnerability into the triumph of omnipotent control, the trauma of being a child into the false triumph of being an adult. The child as abject supplicant becomes the adult as arrogant sadist. In other words ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than any number of academic studies of the seaman’s condition. Nagle’s contemporary Robert Hay, the illiterate son of a Scottish weaver, was another who acquired his whole education at sea. Hay survived the wreck of the frigate Amethyst in Plymouth Sound in 1811 with a copy of Isaac Watts’s Improvement of the Mind in his pocket, and in time ...”

“... Party while condemning the sitting Republican president. He toes the party line in insisting that Robert Mueller’s report ‘vindicated’ Trump on the question of whether he colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. By September 2019, Bolton had joined the ranks of ministers whose utility had been exhausted. In Syria and ...”

“... stand for the impact on England as a whole of having the Book printed in English. They encountered Robert Barnes, a singularly entrepreneurial supporter of the Reformers’ movement. In the words of a deposition made by one of the Steeple Bumpstead men to the authorities who were hot on the tail of the peddlers of an English Bible, Barnes was contemptuous of ...”

“... 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 ...”