“... Eden. To the assertion recently made by John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, that Robert E. Lee was an ‘honourable man’, and the Civil War a gentlemen’s disagreement, Douglass would counter that the ‘bombastic laudation’ and the ‘nauseating flatteries’ of the ‘rebel chief’ cannot distract from the fact that Lee ‘was a ...”

“... on Walt Whitman and ‘the idea that people contain multitudes and contradictions’, and on Robert Frost – ‘The Road Not Taken’, according to Strane, ‘isn’t meant to be a celebration of going against the grain but rather an ironic performance about the futility of choice’. They read Edgar Allan Poe, who (Vanessa knows) married his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... On the morning of 30 April 1865, Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, head of the British Meteorological Department, slit his throat. Because Fitzroy had been the captain of the Beagle, which several decades earlier had carried the young Charles Darwin around the world to conduct the research that eventually bore fruit in On the Origin of Species (1859), and because he was a devout evangelical, some historians have chalked up his suicide to guilt over his unwitting complicity in the genesis of a scientific theory he detested ...”

“... for a surprisingly long time, but when scandal finally came in 1996 – a currency trader called Robert Young, working in cahoots with Cantrade Bank, a Jersey subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant UBS, defrauded investors of $26 million – the Wall Street Journal concluded that Jersey was an offshore hazard ‘living off lax regulation and political ...”

“... Lewin’s account of Lenin’s and Stalin’s interactions is very different from the one given by Robert Service in his biographies, and to my mind less persuasive. As before, Lewin does not address the apparent contradiction between his moderate Lenin and the revolutionary Lenin who seized power half a decade earlier, nor does he address the new material on ...”

“... she is also the translator of Wyslawa Szymborska – while Renata Gorczynski, who, with help from Robert Hass, translated Tremor, I like even more for her willingness to entertain eccentricity in diction and lineation.) The second threat is from sweetness. Here, it is interesting that in his essay ‘Against Poetry’ Zagajewski cites ‘Gombrowicz’s chief ...”

“... subservience of 21st-century citizens to 18th-century political solutions, foremost among them Robert Dahl in his devastating audit of the American political system, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2002). Dahl’s attempt to stir Americans from their cultic attachment to the founders is more than matched, however, by the efforts of ...”

“... United States. It was a year of political disaster. Nixon became President; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated. But for Dummett things were even worse at home. He was ‘deeply involved in work to combat that racism which has, over the past fifteen years, disfigured our national life and dishonoured our country’, and in 1967 the ...”

“... lucid patience and justice, has done nothing better. To bring out three books on the same day, as Robert Lowell knew when he promulgated History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, is to ask for comparisons, indeed to cry out for them when some of the work is old, some new – and the more so when, as in Hinde’s case, each book costs the same to the ...”

“... from the earlier study of the Marthe Brossier case and its 17th-century successors by Professor Robert Mandrou. In this context it is interesting to note that Charles Miron, Bishop of Angers, who exposed Marthe as a fraud with almost casual ease before she even reached Paris, was himself the son of Henri III’s premier médecin. Marescot’s report on the ...”

“... or legitimise increasingly strident assertions of immutable racial hierarchy. The Scottish surgeon Robert Knox, who claimed in Races of Men (1850) that ‘race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word civilisation depends upon it,’ completed his medical training in Paris in the 1820s. So did Josiah Clark Nott, a surgeon from South Carolina, who ...”

“... averages that linked weather to climate could be calculated. Some scientists, such as Harvard’s Robert DeCourcy Ward, who in 1910 became the first professor of climatology in the US, disdained all proxies, insisting that instrumental measurements were the only reliable indices for the modelling of climates past and present. But some believed they had ...”

“... was a man you could get beers with. Donald Sutherland mooned his wedding party, or maybe it was Robert Duvall. He always asked my opinion and never treated me like a child. He could drink a pint of whiskey in one go by the time he was fourteen and hanging out in Oakland’s jazz clubs. I was a hood, he told me. People like us are called ofays, he said. He ...”