“... 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 ...”

“... conducted by the Jesuits in the Italian countryside were religious versions of carnival (just as Robert Burns, describing revivalist religion in 18th-century Ayrshire, wrote of ‘holy fairs’), and the missioners enjoyed the status of modern pop stars. But the more distant missions taken to the Americas and Asia were fatally compromised by the ‘European ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... increasing supply; Joshua Gilpin introduced its use in the US in 1804. And in Paris Nicolas-Louis Robert invented a papermaking machine which, through the use of a conveyor belt, produced not single sheets but a continuous roll: the belt replicated the actions of the vatman and coucher, even the right to left, forward and back shake to distribute the ...”