“... rumours of the plague. It then moves to a review of previous English dictionaries, beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explains ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ borrowed from Latin and other languages, some now obsolete, others, such as sacerdotal, now well established despite Winchester’s comment to the contrary; and why ...”

“... its suggestion that thought and lust might not be distinguishable. Emmett’s favourite poet is Robert Service, once famous for his doggerel about frontier life and American virtue, and probably the last poet to be widely read in America. A poem of his that Emmett mentions, ‘The Men that Don’t Fit in’, is a homily in favour of a settled life. Emmett ...”

“... was lucky: syphilis did not carry him off in his prime. Consider the 19th-century Scottish surgeon Robert Liston, ‘tall . . . powerful . . . dressed in dark bottle-green coat with velvet collar . . . grey trousers and Wellington boots, thumb stuck in the armhole of his vest . . . chewing a tooth pick’, and famous for conducting the first major operation ...”

“... patronising voluntary bodies. Now scholars are less sure. As regards transport and the utilities, Robert Millward points out that councils tended to buy out only enterprises which were in consistent profit, such as gas companies. Councillors’ motives were often not so much to provide an economic or efficient service overall as to relieve the rates ...”

“... real. The Mars Society very nearly fell apart at its first convention over the frank opinions of Robert Zubrin, a scientist who in 1990 had come up with an ingenious engineering solution to the problems of getting people to Mars. The plan, which he called ‘Mars Direct’, was to deploy recycled space shuttle rockets to deliver equipment essential for the ...”

“... system of proportion to which all in his office alluded but no one could explain. When Robert Byron wrote his fine articles for Country Life in 1931 commemorating the achievement at New Delhi he noted that the meeting of classicism and the Orient was ‘a fusion, not of historical reminiscences, but of two schools of architectural thought. The ...”

“... styles. Cary’s pioneering version of 1805 was predominantly Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such Anglocentric and Italocentric ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... departure ceremony in front of the Pentagon with the honoree inspecting rank on rank of troops. Robert Gates, his successor, has done a fine job of not being Donald Rumsfeld. The press cherishes the access he grants them. The military bask in the freedom he grants them to fight the various wars bequeathed by his predecessor. The White House staff applaud ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seemed to feel entitled to the world’s gratitude. ‘Because I am blessed by my good brain,’ Robert Horton, one of Browne’s predecessors, boasted, ‘I tend to get the right answer rather quicker and more often than most people.’ It’s not difficult to imagine Hayward saying something similar. He committed gaffe after gaffe – denying ...”

“... original publisher withdrew, and the judges quit in protest over his treatment. One of them was Robert Lowell, whom Seidel had interviewed for the Paris Review the previous year. Final Solutions, which was eventually published by Random House, is laboriously indebted to Lowell, though the poems often resemble what Randall Jarrell described as the ...”

“... in God, but it’s hard not to imagine such a deity as being like the Gil-Martin who approaches Robert Wringham in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, for Ellroy too seems to regard himself as one of the Elect. This – as Ellroy might well type himself – is sick shit, not least because The Hilliker Curse itself is a prolongation of such ...”

“... it, sadly, as a back-handed assessment of the other achievements. Nichols quotes with disapproval Robert Craft on Ravel’s ‘inability to emerge from the emotional world of his childhood’, but might have represented Craft more fairly by including the rest of the remark (in Current Convictions), which has it that Ravel ‘became a sophisticated ...”

“... looking for funds for his Alexandrian mission, he ended up in the wake of the English adventurer Robert Shirley, on his way from Isfahan to Madrid via the pope. The new mercantile and missionary networks became a vast new scientific instrument, but for Galileo, content to have travelled merely to the stars, such a change was unimaginable. In 1638, when he ...”