“... 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 ...”

“... that the area had been staked out). This complicated phone trail eventually led to a man called Robert Lady. Lady was the CIA’s man in Milan, formally a US vice-consul, but well known to the police as a spy. He was so in love with Italy that he had decided to spend his imminent retirement in a luxurious villa near Turin. When this house was raided by the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bands. One of the earliest was the Cyfarthfa band, in the iron-smelting centre of Merthyr Tydfil. Robert Crawshay, the owner of the Cyfarthfa works, in effect created a private orchestra. He employed a family of musicians from Bradford, members of London theatre orchestras and strolling players; and, like some Renaissance prince or 17th-century cardinal, gave ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and medical measures, particularly those prompted by the discovery of the tubercle bacillus by Robert Koch in 1882? Were they all without merit? With pulmonary tuberculosis, there is no doubt that what doctors did to patients before the discovery and development of the main anti-tuberculosis drugs after World War Two – streptomycin, rifampicin and ...”

“... following the brief Younger Dryas glaciation, had shut down the Gulf Stream for two millennia. Robert Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, scorned the prediction of a sea-level rise of up to 0.59 metres; the figure now looked like a metre at the very least, and he showed a map of what that rise would do to Egypt, the Caspian shores and ...”

“... artistic sensibility he comes closest to the German Romantics: perhaps most of all to the composer Robert Schumann, born just a year after Poe, whose fantasy pieces – inconclusive, fragmentary, whimsical and haunting – Poe probably never heard. A novelist of Ackroyd’s talents could have anticipated the risk involved in starting at the end of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”