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“... of the presiding literary spirits when Brautigan arrived in town would have been Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer (to whom Trout Fishing In America is dedicated). Writers such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Snyder, Creeley would also have been moving through at this point, but the so-called Beat Scene was not fully fledged, and its principals not ...”

“... which was a central focus of an earlier tradition of the sociology of science, initiated by Robert Merton, but on which recent sociology has been too silent. Science is humanity’s finest cognitive achievement. It is also a social achievement, through and through, and can and should be analysed as such: to do so diminishes it not a whit. And ...”

“... gaps in his data with information from their specimens. A major source was the Beagle’s captain, Robert Fitzroy, whose published view on the variation among the finches was that it was ‘one of those admirable provisions of Infinite Wisdom by which each created thing is adapted to the place for which it was intended’. It is ironic that, to buttress his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gangsters were left – and because this book draws its own line at 1948 we get too little of Robert Stroud (the ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’, portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the film of the same name), the prisoner who made the most of his incarceration. There would be one more escape, in 1960. Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, Clarence and John, got ...”

“... and collecting books; hers were travel, hunting and the theatre. The man who shared her tastes was Robert Dudley, with whom she enjoyed the main emotional relationship of her adult years. Much of the celebrated rivalry between Cecil and Dudley grew out of jealousy on Cecil’s part and his ill-suppressed belief that Dudley was a bad influence. What Cecil and ...”

“... is being used to pave the way for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. Meanwhile, in Britain, Robert Bittlestone has recently argued that Odysseus’ homeland is not modern Ithaki, but the peninsula of Paliki, now attached to Kefalonia, but once, he claims, a separate island. Geologists may manage to prove that Paliki was once detached from Kefalonia, but ...”

“... Brotton offers sensitive readings of plays that veer between crude caricatures of Islam (as in Robert Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon, which contains a cameo by a fire-breathing brass head of the ‘God Mahomet’) and more nuanced or informed portrayals, including the uneasy and shifting identities inhabited by Othello – the Christian Moor who, at ...”

“... Barry was an eccentric, seen ‘in his worst (that is to say, his maddest) days’, according to Robert Southey, in a dirt and paint-encrusted green baize coat with a tired old wig. But a bequest was the best hope for the two women, whose other male relatives had proven unreliable. Margaret’s brother, John, apprenticed to a Dublin lawyer, had already ...”

“... dramatic, case-by-case study of a family in crisis. On the other hand, he isn’t immune to what Robert Frost once called ‘the august occasions of the state’, and this makes his drama all the stronger. In Episode 3, when George VI is dead and the aforementioned David turns up at Marlborough House to have tea with Queen Mary, the atmosphere is daintily ...”

“... have missed on previous occasions. Two of her Partisan Review essays – on the cancellation of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954 and on a Beat poets’ reading at Columbia in 1958 – stand out for me in this respect. Like a good liberal – ‘I was against both communism and McCarthyism. They were enemies of each other, but I was the ...”

“... ancient sources contradict one another on the details of his downfall, but it is immortalised in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in which Sejanus (a young Patrick Stewart in the BBC adaption) is presented by his successor, Macro, with the letter ordering his summary execution and the butchery of all his family. After seven years at the apex of power, Macro was ...”

“... political turmoil, though their precise role remains murky. The American hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a friend of Nigel Farage, was accused of aiding the Leave campaign with data analytics expertise, via the now defunct company Cambridge Analytica. Hedge funds were generous backers of both the Leave and Remain campaigns in 2016, but both sides ...”

“... company he wanted to join (the straight-acting insiders of the new moment, like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Frank O’Hara). A successful commercial artist, homosexual, Catholic, working-class – the grounds for exclusion, or self-exclusion, were multiple. Warhol’s parents were Ruthenians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father came to ...”

“... 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 ...”