“... we enjoy reading Enright is because we want to know what he’s been reading – Pascal and Robert Musil mostly, it seems, towards the end of his life. But then again he read everything. He was omdamniverous. To read Enright reading is to read about history, and literature, and newspaper headlines, and pamphlets from Indian takeaways. Within a couple of ...”

“... The state of Pepys’s papers plunged him into severe depression, while the brilliant, prolific Robert Boyle lived in a chaos of bundles, bottles and mechanical devices in a bedroom-cum-laboratory. Evelyn’s motto was omnia explorate, meliora retinete (‘look into everything, keep the best’). Had he lived more strictly by it, my task would have been ...”

“... the hardships of life on board a naval brig, not least the misery of sharing a cabin with Captain Robert Fitzroy, whose temperament Darwin privately described as ‘a most unfortunate one. This was shown not only by passion but by fits of long-continued moroseness against those who had offended him,’ particularly the unfortunate Darwin, whose journals bear ...”

“... because of the apparent unwillingness of the Democrats (with such honourable exceptions as Senator Robert Byrd) to sense either a principled or even a merely opportunistic reason to act on their findings. Plenty of people are telling the truth to power but power is not listening. Take the case of Willi Münzenberg, the high-living ‘red millionaire’ who ...”

“... for a response, but there was none. Carver’s British reception has taken a little time. The Robert Altman movie Short Cuts, of 1993, based on nine stories and a poem of Carver’s, helped to get him wider notice. Among the stories incorporated in the film were ‘A Small, Good Thing’ – the one about the bereaved couple and the exigent baker – and ...”

“... The emphasis being steadily on the Incarnation, the mortal nature of the child is always relevant. Robert Campin’s The Virgin and Child in an Interior, of about 1430, fills what may look to us like a simple idea with recondite symbolisms: even the position of the child’s left hand is important, for he touches his mother’s face with a conventional ...”

“... has the creative imagination and misses the reality of things by his theatrical posturing’; Robert Bone attacks Micheaux’s work for having ‘lost all contact with Negro life and culture’. The only book on Micheaux’s literary output, reworked by Joseph Young from his doctoral dissertation, is bluntly called Black Novelist as White Racist: The Myth ...”

“... study of Greenwich Village she showed that there was order behind the apparent chaos. While Robert Moses was proposing to carve up New York to make way for the car and expressway she called for the rich process of interaction that defined the city to be nurtured rather than destroyed. She envisaged a large residential population living in mixed-use ...”

“... do it; three-year-olds, by conventional tests, cannot. Rhesus monkeys, in the same test done by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, did not. (It seems more and more likely that bottle-nosed dolphins and killer whales are like apes and human four-year-olds, not like three-year olds and monkeys.) Great apes can recognise themselves in ...”

“... lifelong penchant for disguise. We are told that he was obsessed with certain books by Robert Louis Stevenson, but no convincing explanations are offered. Why was he so eager to adapt The Suicide Club, Stevenson’s strange tale of a group of men who agree to act as each other’s executioners? Willetts doesn’t tell us. Edward Hyde, a sinister ...”

“... in the 1950s, and the consequent destruction of the borough. Directed by the infamous city planner Robert Moses, the Cross-Bronx Expressway cut through a dozen densely populated neighbourhoods, and around 60,000 people lost their homes, including Berman. He was appalled by the destruction, but because the idea of progress was so deeply rooted in his and the ...”

“... hierarchy. Responding to the heterodox Essay on Spirit (1750) by the controversial Irish bishop Robert Clayton, William Warburton, a future bishop of Gloucester, made clear his attitude towards this offshore reservation: ‘The Bishop of Clogher, or some such heathenish name, in Ireland, has just published a book. It is made up out of the rubbish of old ...”

“... it was Charles II’s recurrent malaria that finally made its use acceptable. He was treated by Robert Talbor, a Cambridge apothecary, who, while disparaging the bark, employed a secret recipe that contained it. Charles recommended Talbor to his friend Louis XIV when the Dauphin was ill with fever. The treatment was successful, and Talbor became a pensioned ...”

“... the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide ...”

“... MI6 officer seconded to MI5 who introduced himself as Colin Ferguson and later said his name was Robert McLarnon. Believing in neither name, Duddy called him Fred. The Northern Irish members of the link were relatively optimistic that a peace deal might be possible. The conflict had reached a stalemate: the British could contain the IRA but not defeat it and ...”