“... years), that Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to rationalise the contents of his hoard after the fact, and concentrated instead on his subject’s social and business interests and his patronage of scientific research. Frances ...”

“... binding constitution of the UK and exhibit a terrier-like approach to constitutional anomalies. Robert McIntyre was the SNP’s first MP, elected in the closing stages of the Second World War. It was a custom of the House that MPs could take their seats only after being sponsored by two MPs who presented the newcomer to the Commons, a procedure whose ...”

“... but it sold in tens of thousands once its cheap double-column edition was printed by William and Robert Chambers’s pioneering Edinburgh steam press. Phrenology, with its materialist reduction of mind to brain, collapsed the distinction between humanity and nature that Lyell and Davy had been so fastidious in maintaining. But in Combe’s hands it became a ...”

“... things a clue to their origin or were they the product of a process of mineralisation underground? Robert Hooke made early use of microscopy to identify cells in what could thereby be identified as fossilised wood, and Nicolas Steno dissected a shark’s head to demonstrate that the well known fossils called glossopetrae, ‘tongue-stones’, found embedded in ...”

“... 1931, or that Dudley Carew’s memoir, The House Is Gone, was published in 1949 by the firm of Robert Hale? Who is Dudley Carew anyway, and where does Taylor lay his hands on these remarkably recondite texts? Why should one begin a paragraph with the sentence, ‘After publishing his first novel, A Day in Summer (1963), J.L. Carr gave up his job as a ...”

“... that fish can feel pain, and some invertebrates too, including hermit crabs and octopuses. Robert Elwood, of Queen’s University in Belfast, studies pain in invertebrates by looking for behavioural responses that go beyond reflexes and simple aversion. For example, a hermit crab will abandon a valuable shell if it receives slight electric shocks. If ...”

“... at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live’. One ...”

“... Jung ascribed to Hitler, is probably worse, and probably less probable. For those familiar with Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the question is whether we’re in the hands of the existential-fool murderer Moosbrugger or the supercilious and beguiling industrialist Arnheim. But why choose? We should consider the possibility that Trump and his ...”

“... More recently, the case has attracted attention from historians of illicit literature such as Robert Darnton, interested in explaining the success of Thérèse philosophe, and from historians of medicine fascinated by Cadière’s visions and trances. An article on it even appeared in the journal Epilepsy and Behaviour. Scientists, ignoring the long ...”

“... trip. Perhaps it was always unlikely that someone whose models were Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Tzara, Robert Walser and Gottfried Benn would win prizes, honours or even a sizeable readership in Britain or the US. And his poetry has a prickliness about it, as did the poet: a quality of neither asking nor needing to be liked. In any event he would have been pleased ...”

“... popular literature took account of various stress disorders. Even before the wars, in books like Robert Burton’s bestselling Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), there was an awareness that ‘the simple narration many times’ of traumatic stories could help bring meaning to confusion and offer control to the sufferer. But in an age of Christian, neo-Stoic ...”

“... code – takes us deep into one of the major subjects of the novel, the difficulty of learning, as Robert Lowell’s title says, ‘to speak of woe that is in marriage’. When Ralph sees what has happened to his cousin Isabel’s grand ambitions for a rich, free life, we are told that he ‘woefully’ exclaims to himself how far she has fallen. In a discreet ...”

“... this isn’t the sort of thing it’s worth worrying about in a thriller; I once read a novel by Robert Ludlum in which the hero gives his London cab driver a £100 note. Anyway, ‘a group of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia separatists assaulted a ranch in northern Algeria where Suliman Cindoruk was believed to be hiding’ – huh? just roll with it – but they ...”

“... the predominant buyer in the market, capable of dictating the terms of trade. This success led Robert Thorpe, the former chief justice of the colony, to launch a scathing attack on the company in the London press. By dominating trade in Sierra Leone, he argued, wasn’t Macaulay & Babington acting as a domineering economic agent of the sort that Smith and ...”

“... before him. The impact of these paintings on the history of cinema is hard to overstate. Valentine Robert calls them ‘protocinematic’ in their continuous temporal flow and shifting points of view; her catalogue essay traces the many filmmakers who have used their almost documentary detail like a storyboard. Besides the Americans, these include Alice ...”