“... had passed; the amnesty had been granted; he would not be executed like his fellow collaborator Robert Brasillach. But that was precisely the problem. To be forgotten, to cease to matter in French literature: that would be a fate more repugnant than being (in his words) the ‘abominable snowman’ of French literature. And so he had to rehabilitate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... without noticing it. The first European to discover the Mississippi from the sea was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was assisted by local Indian guides in 1682. On a riverbank several days upstream La Salle shouted ‘Vive le Roi!’ and claimed the Mississippi Basin for Louis XIV. He named the vast territory, amounting to a third of the ...”

“... and racism even in notes to his mum was, for Amis, a sign of humourless cultural Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from him ...”

“... Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was fascinated by the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the godfather of modern magic, so when he and Dash put their tricks out to work, at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they performed as the Houdini Brothers: with their thick black hair and swarthy complexions they didn’t ...”

“... the more lugubrious, latter-day stand-up comedians, such as Bill Murray or Jerry Seinfeld, or even Robert De Niro’s funny-unfunny, mother-haunted Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. Lonoff himself is a wonderfully comic creation, morose and unforthcoming yet vividly alive on the page. At the close of the book his long-suffering wife walks out (‘I’m ...”

“... the accused has ever admitted to any specific acts, though Jake Prescott wrote to one bomb victim, Robert Carr, apologising for the attack on him (an apology graciously accepted), and John Barker has stated that ‘the police framed a guilty man.’ The convicted Anna Mendelson publishes poetry under another name and the acquitted Angela Weir became the ...”

“... naivety. He did not know that Diana loathed the Palace apparatchiks (including her brother-in-law, Robert Fellowes, who was the Queen’s private secretary). Nor did he know that she cultivated her own contacts with the press, both directly and through her friends. Since he thought Fellowes must enjoy Diana’s confidence, he accepted without question his ...”

“... ripe for resolution, often because the necessary laboratory techniques have just come on stream. Robert Koch’s choice of anthrax in 1873 is a brilliant instance of this. Thanks to anthrax, he founded bacteriology as a science and in little over a decade catapulted himself from the life of a rural doctor in a small town in Posen – a province of the Second ...”

“... multiplying, braced for what Fleming calls ‘a luxurious stretch on Death Row’. But didn’t Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos protest at the lack of luxury on Death Row? Shut in a kind of damned Hotel, Discountenanced by God and man; The food? – Sir, you would do as well To fill your belly full of bran. The company? Alas the day That I should toil with ...”

“... Though the Company was set up as a rival to the Whig Bank of England and her political enemy Sir Robert Harley initially supported it, Sarah did not let this put her off. But as shares rose dramatically, she began to believe that the bubble would burst and dumped her own shares, persuading Marlborough to do the same. They more than tripled their money. With ...”

“... and bake the mixture in a pie crust, but I balked at the final instruction from the 17th-century Robert May to ice the pies. The 13th-century recipe for craspoix is disarmingly simple, but demands salted whale meat. A Roman recipe begins: ‘Pluck the flamingo.’ The recipe for huiguorou is a characteristic Sichuan example of cooking with multiple salty ...”