“... High’s Latinate period, which – though the school was an ancient foundation and claimed Robert Henryson, the ‘Scottish Chaucer’, among its early masters – occurred circa 1935. The headmaster, whom I encountered face to face only once, had MA Cantab after his name and wore a black cloak that, though every teacher had one, gave him an especially ...”

“... Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s biographer, has composed it in association with the lepidopterist Robert Pyle; the translations from Russian are by Dmitri Nabokov. Nonetheless, doubt rises early. We are immediately confronted by Philippe Halsman’s photograph of the most-famous-butterfly-hunter-in-the-world ready to swipe, the gaze for once directed straight ...”

“... to those critics of poetry who simply follow current fashions. He possesses in a high degree what Robert Lowell called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his work often echoes those early Irish nature poems he admires – poetry which, as he points out, belonged to a tradition which did not undergo Romance influences and which ‘registers certain sensations ...”

“... large, looked like it might find itself in the grip of a violent conflict over Indigenous rights. Robert Muldoon’s reactionary government had been voted out of office in 1984, and the incoming Labour administration of David Lange did at least begin to take the Crown’s obligations under the Te Tiriti (the 1840 treaty between the British and the ...”

“... Maria Theresa​ Walburga Amalia Christine, as she was baptised in Vienna in 1717, did not expect to become queen – or ‘female king’ (rex femina) as she was known in several of her many lands. After observing the ravages of the War of the Spanish Succession, Charles VI issued the Pragmatic Sanction, an edict which aimed to ensure that his (as yet unborn) children – even his daughters – would stand in line to inherit his kingdoms ...”

“... who sweated over his first drafts until such time as his imperious vanity was no longer tolerable. Robert Gottlieb of Knopf finally had to invoke his ‘Fuck-You Principle’, which held that he’d put up with difficult authors only until he could take no more, and then, business or no business, fuck them. The final straw for Gottlieb was an offensive stream ...”

“... Godfrey Kneller’s Kit Cat Club portraits, clockwise from top left: Jacob Tonson (1717); Robert Walpole (c.1712); William Congreve (1709); Joseph Addison (c.1710). Around this time Tonson founded the Kit-Cat Club, whimsically named after a fancy pastry merchant called Christopher Cat, but in practice the engine-room of Whig politics during the ...”

“... Africa. A small imperial army under Belisarius (Procopius’ hero, interestingly reimagined by Robert Graves) routed the usurper Gelimer not once but twice: in 533-34, the Vandal kingdom crumpled with no further hint of resistance. Buoyed by that near miraculous success, Justinian set his sights on Italy, where another murderous succession squabble was ...”

“... of petitioners’ threats to burn down this person’s house or shoot that man. In East Yorkshire, Robert Sharp had a stone thrown at him by a female pauper who had been ‘stopped in her pay’. The poor, King insists, were not ‘other’: they belonged. Even after 1800 they ‘remained fellow creatures’ inside a social order that gave them a degree of ...”

“... forces of the recently deposed James II surrounded the largely Protestant city. Its governor, Robert Lundy, wanted to negotiate surrender as they didn’t have the resources to withstand a prolonged siege. But thirteen apprentice boys defied him and closed the gates. Lundy was banished, replaced by a stauncher man. The siege lasted 105 days. Derry’s ...”

“... was able to leave the vast sum of £25,000 to Susannah, who very soon married Erasmus’s son Robert. And when the son of this union, Charles, married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, another of Josiah’s grandchildren, she brought a lavish dowry of £5000 and an annual allowance of £400. Darwin later joked that his family were ‘the degenerate descendants of ...”

“... yet consigned to the skip two excellent earlier Lives, A.N. Wilson’s Hilaire Belloc (1984) and Robert Speaight’s The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957). If a debunker were needed for this wittily bellicose (‘Bellocose’, Wilson suggests) Catholic author of more than 150 publications (which smacks of thraldom to the work ethic some call the Protestant ...”

“... 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 ...”