“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”