“... 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 ...”

“... coulisses of Argentine politics, and can fairly be called a participant as well as a commentator. Robert Cox of the Buenos Aires Herald, who writes with the authority of a fellow editor whose support for Timerman never wavered, says that ‘La Opinion gave lukewarm support for human rights and ... maintained weathervane policies according to the views of ...”

“... seems so long ago. Zimbabwe has just celebrated the third anniversary of its independence. Comrade Robert Mugabe rules. Ministers have been fired, reinstated, shuffled sideways. The British have made an integrated national army out of the two guerrilla forces and the North Koreans have invited themselves to train a separate praetorian guard. The IMF has been ...”

“... pilot officer’. While Ashton and many other male dancers performed their wartime duties, Robert Helpmann took advantage of their absence to promote himself, which Ashton resented as much as the fact that Helpmann, who was Australian, did not join up. Ashton used their rivalry to subtle comic effect when they played the Ugly Sisters in ...”

“... from the classics, which all readers above the rank of ragamuffin were expected to recognise. Sir Robert Peel (Sir Rhubarb Pill) did duty as Pandora, Ceres, Phaeton and Sisyphus. However, when the Duke of Buckingham was shown as ‘The Modern Eresicthon’ preparing to eat his own head, the magazine thought fit to explain that Eresicthon of Thessaly, having ...”

“... poetry that has always been careful of locality: Randolph Stow’s early work, for example, or Robert Adamson’s Hawkesbury River poems, or, from an earlier generation, Judith Wright’s concern for landscape. The title-poem of Kinsella’s most recent book, The Hunt – Other Poems (1998), is dedicated to Les Murray, who reaches out to an international ...”

“... cry out to be tested. It is no surprise that one of many legends about John Hunter suggests that Robert Louis Stevenson based Dr Jekyll’s laboratory on Hunter’s house in Leicester Square, Jekyll having ‘bought the house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon’. Hunter remains a figure as legendary as his Giant. Myth can make for cliché, but Mantel ...”

“... Australian ex-servicemen is not contested, and it is reflected in Kangaroo. The Australian writer Robert Darroch maintains that Lawrence’s character Cooley, the Jewish leader known as Kangaroo, is based on General Rosenthal, who was very well liked by the returning Diggers. He was not a Jew, as Lawrence may have assumed; or he may have got that trait from ...”

“... procreational theory that constructs the male role as creative and the female role as nurturing. (Robert Alter is praised for using the word ‘seed’ in his translation of Genesis, where others fudge the problem by using ‘posterity’, ‘descendants’ or ‘progeny’. But the praise is immediately revoked: ‘Writing in the late 20th century, he cannot ...”

“... Or Debbie Ladley. She was 18, a nanny, and she had given some help to LAND. James Cutler and Robert Edwards record: ‘On 29 September 1986, she was hanging out her washing in her garden at Stragglethorpe near Fulbeck. A man grabbed her from behind by the throat and banged her head against the wall. She suffered a fractured wrist, a cracked rib and ...”

“... How are we to read the history of sexuality? In the Introduction volume to his great multi-volume essay in critical-revisionism, Michel Foucault set out to demystify the discourse which has informed post-Victorian accounts about sex, whether therapeutic (Reich), scholarly (Bloch) or polemical (Marcuse). Such histories were traditionally cast in a progressive, Whiggish, emancipatory framework, presupposing a dialectics of drives, repression and liberation ...”

“... If you look around you in the Tube you may see someone, usually a man, reading a thriller by Robert Ludlum, or someone else, usually a woman, making her way through one of Catherine Cookson’s romances. On a good day there will be one person reading a novel by Anita Brookner. But that’s about it. Among those who don’t travel on the Tube, the ...”

“... the most haunting stories in the book is that of the Tierra del Fuegian boy kidnapped by Captain Robert Fitzroy, Chief Officer of HMS Beagle, in 1830. The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the ...”