“... 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 ...”

“... by ACLEFEU. So, by and large, does Marie-George Buffet, the Communist contender, whose predecessor Robert Hue fared disastrously in 2002. Buffet is the self-styled candidate of the ‘popular anti-liberal left’: a left-of-socialist coalition that failed to come together at the end of last year, enabling the Communists to ...”

“... The soundtrack might be Muddy Waters singing ‘You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had’ or Robert Johnson’s ‘Drunken Hearted Man’. Repetition, sexual boasting, showy licks and riffs: the novel has it all. There is even a touch of satanic folklore, in the shape of a ghostly hobo rumoured to be the devil himself. While not exactly ...”

“... act with righteous violence, sometimes not. Often they are stymied by the peevishness and self-interest of police bureaucracy. They live in the real world, the fallen world: the attractions of crime are far more potent than they are. But how often does that version of police work play in the heads of actual policemen? In most popular culture, the ...”

“... first nights, she seldom fails to tell the producer or director how much she loathed the show. To Robert Evans, producer of Love Story, at the Royal Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts ...”

“... of human shit. The book’s most extraordinary feature though is Carrington’s unsettling lack of self-pity. She describes how her parents sent her nanny to see her: ‘Tirelessly, Nanny repeated, “What have they done to you … what have they done to you,” and wept by my bed … I was exasperated by it, for I felt at that moment that my parents were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Szakall.Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic small talk (‘How’s the ...”

“... of silver cutlery, three watches and fourteen gold rings. I picture the Berkshires: busy, eager, self-preoccupied, until something touches them too nearly, at which point they take an interest all the greater for their previous neglect. It makes sense of their not having given much mind to Bonell’s ‘frequent’ habit of bringing men up to his ...”

“... and representative liberal politics.Relative to the other European powers, Britain and Russia were self-sufficient. They had an important common interest in preventing the domination of the Continent by France or Germany. Beyond that, they had distinct spheres of influence where neither was very interested in supporting the other. As a result, their occasional ...”

“... devised by a collective that later called itself Gran Fury, and Schulman’s book is unusual for a self-described political history in treating ACT UP’s cultural production as indivisible from its other activities. Let the Record Show, which was installed in a display window at the New Museum in SoHo, invoked memories of the Nuremberg Trials by envisioning a ...”

“... stopping people from finding out God’s truth for themselves. In the late 1540s, the much more self-consciously Protestant government of Henry’s son, Edward VI, delivered the coup de grâce to the old system. It closed and confiscated the endowments of the thousands of chantries where non-monastic priests still celebrated masses for souls. In doing so it ...”

“... innovations that would spawn entirely new technology-based industries for the Boston region. A self-consciously hybrid creation, combining elements of research university, polytechnic and (last and least) liberal arts teaching college, MIT was not unique among 19th-century American institutions of higher education in combining such forms and purposes. In ...”

“... a flannelette nightie. Did that give licence to the next day’s BBC Book Programme, opened by Robert Robinson on the proposition that ‘the judges made the wrong choice’? A ‘favourite aunt’, ‘a jam-making grandmother’, ‘Pooterish’, ‘distrait’: this is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented, finding a ...”

“... breathe not his name!’ was the song by Thomas Moore, the name being that of the patriot Robert Emmet, executed after leading the 1803 rebellion, who asked that his epitaph remain unwritten until his country had taken its place among the nations of the earth. High speech and silence, this was the patriotic way, and no silence more urgent than that of ...”