“... got it right: she had seen it all before under the microscope.In​ 1827, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown undertook an investigation into the pollen of Clarkia pulchella, a straggly plant with slender pale purple petals that splay out like chicken feet. Placing the pollen grains in water, he saw through the microscope that they were ‘very evidently in ...”

“... persuaded post-war Conservatives that – in the adaptive and ameliorist tradition of Sir Robert Peel – they should accept the (apparently irreversible) political realities of Keynsian economics, public ownership and the welfare state. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the early Fifties he continued the policies of fiscal management and full ...”

“... good or ill crops up again: the recumbent wife’s blue-cotton gloves, the allusion to dead uncle Robert, who once posthumously materialised in a bus queue at Hendon, and later in the winter garden. The winter garden of Russia is the scene of a good deal of materialisation. Ashburner loses his suitcase but it turns up, interfered with; Nina disappears more or ...”

“... of the industry. Another part of his defence, which he has repeated in interviews, was that Robert Newland, Jopling’s former strategist, had joined his operation in 2016 and turned it criminal. US government investigators found spreadsheets detailing all the oversold artworks, with the hapless investors clearly marked, along with a note reading ‘How ...”

“... every weekend and becomes an urban beach.The story of the M8 starts with the Bruce Report in 1945 (Robert Bruce was Glasgow’s chief engineer). It is remembered for two startling proposals: first, the destruction of almost all of the city centre and its architecturally significant buildings, including the School of Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Mitchell ...”

“... or requests had to be written or typed on the correct blank form.In Good-Bye to All That (1929), Robert Graves complained about the ‘army forms marked “Urgent”’ which ‘constantly arrived from headquarters’ and were ‘all contradictory’. These forms were prefixed ‘AF’ and indexed with a number and a ‘class’ letter, which in 1917 ran ...”

“... of independence from political control. Unlike Trump, who tried to fire the former special counsel Robert Mueller, Biden has made no attempt to breach this norm. Federal convictions differ from state convictions in one further, striking way: as Debs learned, federal convicts can be pardoned by the president, while state prisoners can be pardoned only though a ...”

“... Robert Hughes​ has a great enthusiasm for Goya’s art, which he communicates in this biography, together with much useful information, forcefully expressed, about the rival factions at the Bourbon court, the Napoleonic invasion, the evolution of bull-fighting, what a maja was, what guerrillas were. This is mixed with some less useful observations – there were in those days priests who ‘groped boys’ and were ‘quite as bad’ as their modern counterparts – and some errors, as when Hughes claims that the curls of pubic hair in the Naked Maja are certainly the earliest in Western art ...”

“... a likeness of a pseudonym). But even here there are some odd lapses of judgment: Bate credits Robert Nye with the notion that the simile of the eddy in The Rape of Lucrece is based on observation of Clopton Bridge in Stratford, when Nye actually lifted the idea from Caroline Spurgeon’s important Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), which ...”

“... in the novel to other Prague-related works: the name of the vigilante group Florizel comes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club, whose three stories feature Prince Florizel of Bohemia, a character borrowed, in turn, from The Winter’s Tale.Prague is a place where reality becomes fiction, and fiction reality. But Oyeyemi’s allusions do little ...”

“... Cold War promise of apocalypse has been kicked away only to uncover rampant nationalism and what Robert Lowell called ‘small war on the heels of small war’. Our destiny seems to lurk in terrorist outrages and unstoppable new viruses, in the city homeless, in ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Bhopal, in rising world temperatures and evaporating ...”

“... also skirts the actual teaching of the subject in the universities. Nor is he convinced by Robert Crawford’s claim that English literature as an academic field was ‘invented’ in the universities of Enlightenment Scotland, where in 1762 Hugh Blair became the first incumbent of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh. According ...”

“... homosexual rape carried out by an older man – specifically, a domineering uncle-guardian named Robert Manning, whose bed and board were shared by the fledgling author before he left for Bowdoin College. (Manning also happened to be, for those who might want to make something of it, the most renowned pomologist in the United States.) For ...”

“... who has lived mostly in Oxford during the war, and a strange rather animal young man called Robert Heber-Percy. The latter is like some pleasant kind of animal; on the whole a pony or a stag. He manages the home farm and gardens – and possibly the house. A butler was the only servant visible and we helped ourselves to an excellent lunch – roast ...”

“... reported his interrogation of two British officers to the Swiss Red Cross. As a result, Captain Robert MacGregor and Lt Capsis were accorded POW status, escaping the Sonderbehandlung – execution – of Commandos which was ordered by Hitler in October 1942. ‘Of course I knew about British Commandos,’ said Waldheim, ‘only I myself never interrogated ...”