“... family, and the nurse who, for her whole adult life, cared for the dying only to herself die young and alone from a horribly painful and degrading illness’? If biological death is final, as it seems to be, ‘if the good and the bad alike go down into oblivion, if there is nothing about reality itself that shores up this basic moral difference between ...”

“... a 24-year-old RKO contract player who had just been nominated for an Oscar for Crossfire, played a young singer (though she didn’t sing herself). By 1 June, when Ray and Grahame married in Las Vegas, she was four months pregnant with their son Tim. When Bogart bought the rights to Hughes’s novel, he imagined Lauren Bacall for the role of Laurel Gray. The ...”

“... case, a technical prerequisite. You need an A-bomb to ignite an H-bomb, and the lab’s Director Robert Oppenheimer reasonably enough felt that the race to forestall the Nazis required no distractions from the main lines of development. Destructive friction between fusion and fission was reduced by giving Teller what was essentially a roaming brief, and it ...”

“... Liverpool. The virus was being grown in fertile hens’ eggs. One of the membranes attached to the young embryo was ‘dropped’ by making an artificial air space between it and the shell, creating a kind of platform. After being inoculated onto it the virus grew in its cells, producing small lesions called pocks. After pock formation the egg was cut open and ...”

“... his blood was so mad, it felt like coagulating. It was equally clear that Crosby Stills Nash & Young were on about Nixon and the National Guard when they recorded ‘Ohio’ in 1970 (‘Four dead in Ohio’). There had always been vague protest songs, cut loose from proximate causes, such as ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Lady ...”

“... saviour and leader, yet refused to reduce the size of his army. In 1817, the British officer Robert Wilson pointed out that Russia’s population had grown from 22 million to at least 42 million since 1762. In 1828, de Lacy Evans estimated that Russia’s population was 50 million and would reach 73 million in another fifteen years. Since the ...”

“... her novels from the 1970s is The Driver’s Seat (1970) – Spark’s own favourite – in which a young woman sets out to get murdered and wears a flamboyant dress so that plenty of people notice her in the moments before her death. It was in part an experiment in the nouveau roman, but it became more than that because, despite its emotionally detached ...”

“... manufactured by Dow in large quantities and then deployed in the firebombings of Berlin and Tokyo. Robert Neer, a historian of napalm, quotes a Japanese medical professor describing the carnage: ‘There was no one to rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties, turned ...”

“... so forth – and Geertz quickly became embroiled in a bitter losing battle to recruit his friend Robert Bellah, a sociologist of religion, which erupted into the gleefully malicious pages of several national newspapers. (Geertz quotes a ‘particularly enragé mathematician’ telling the director Carl Kaysen that ‘social science will be your ...”

“... only other living French novelist I would compare with her as a source of intelligent pleasure, Robert Pinget.) She went about literature slowly once she had taken to it. Tropisms, her first book, was not published until 1939, seven years after she began writing it. It is a sparse but mordant collection of short scenes of social exchange whose ordinariness ...”

“... 22 June they were forced to surrender.A few days later in Nancy, the occupying forces arrested a young medical orderly while he was trying to escape into the countryside on an old bicycle without tyres. He was stocky and fit, but somewhat shortsighted, which had disqualified him from active military service. Along with more than a thousand other prisoners he ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... for Europe. For a while they lived in Deyá, Mallorca, where Mathews came under the influence of Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess lurks behind some of the arcane mystic lore that turns up in the plot of his first novel, The Conversions (1962). A much greater influence on his early fiction, however, was Raymond Roussel, to whose work he was introduced ...”

“... the camera), and because it showed to the full Karel Reisz’s sympathy for people who, in Robert Musil’s words, go out on an adventure and lose their way. This was a key element in all his films, whether they were set in Nottingham, London or Las Vegas. I think especially of the confused and manic Morgan in the film of that name, and of the driven ...”

“... et vituperatio – vituperatio, above all, against contemporary Europe and the ignorance of the young: By what right did Keyes, or my cousin’s Lancaster, or the trapped below-decks watch of Peter’s clangorous old destroyer-escort, serve to enfranchise these strange children pitiless in their ignorance and contempt? Like Matthew Arnold telling the ...”