“... is dismayed to notice, when his thoughts turn to ending it all – in the style of Hart Crane or Robert Maxwell – that, wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ...”

“... another group of rebels dragged the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, and the treasurer, Robert Hales, out of the Tower of London and beheaded them on Tower Hill. On 15 June the rebels and the king met again, this time at Smithfield. Their leader, Wat Tyler, failed to doff his cap, instead taking the king’s arm and shaking it roughly in ...”

“... civil-society theorists about the inevitability of the break-up of the Soviet empire in 1989, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone warned of the dire consequences for the political culture of the United States of failing to nourish similar voluntary forms of civic participation. Kwon applauds the creation of an ‘ethical horizon of human solidarity beyond the ...”

“... which has cost the taxpayer nothing’. But what if it had been – oh, I don’t know . . . Robert Hughes, or Rolf Harris – sitting on a bed, looming over a naked 16-year-old girl, blowing the petals away from her mons veneris? Greer’s argument that modern society has forbidden women the pleasure of boys’ bodies is almost wrecked by the ...”

“... has been further refined and elegantly extended by one of the foremost economists of our time, Robert Solow, in his monograph An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability, published a little over a decade ago. Solow sees sustainability as the requirement that the next generation must be left with: ‘whatever it takes to achieve a standard of living at ...”

“... and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by mugging up or other ...”

“... should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet by facet, but the result is rather ...”

“... 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 ...”