“... between smoking and lung cancer. It’s worth comparing Mukherjee’s account to the historian Robert Proctor’s in Cancer Wars (1996). Where Mukherjee is interested in molecular causes of cancer, Proctor focuses on environmental causes. And where Mukherjee’s story is one of scientific discovery, Proctor tells how various industries have attempted to ...”

“... without them in the 1933 Supplement. This was the decision of the new Supplement’s chief editor, Robert Burchfield. Ogilvie criticises Burchfield, and her book has caused some fuss on account of its supposed allegation that he surreptitiously deleted words of foreign origin from the OED. She contends that by bringing back the tramlines Burchfield was ...”

“... attitude to their fine furniture and irreproachable outfits; excessive patricianness also leads to Robert Lowell-style manic episodes and nasty yachting accidents. Third place goes to Boris by virtue of Russian soulfulness. Second goes to Theo’s mother, a scrappy woman from Kansas who funded an advanced degree in art history by working as a fashion model on ...”

“... Institute of Advanced Study as an assistant to John von Neumann. A chance meeting with Robert Oppenheimer led to an invitation to talk about the Zipf-Mandelbrot law at the Institute. The talk fell flat, people fell asleep, and a distinguished historian of mathematics stood up and declared he hadn’t understood a word. Mandelbrot was paralysed, but ...”

“... Nuremberg and Tokyo trials had their critics, ranging from Hannah Arendt to the Republican Senator Robert Taft, as well as Hans Kelsen, the positivist visionary of international law, who saw them as providing not legal redress but retribution, since their competence was expressly limited to acts committed by the losing side. (It is characteristic of ...”

“... Reform Acts, though more on ecclesiastical than political grounds. He wrote to the Times deploring Robert Peel’s plan for a reading room for working-class men and women in the Midlands. Libraries without religious books he regarded as unacceptable. When Pius IX threw open the papal prisons in a general amnesty, Newman referred to their occupants as the ...”

“... promised to no one.’ This is so stylish you almost think you are at the movies. Joe is played by Robert Chew, a vast, creepy, cunning whale of a man. Marlo is Jamie Hector. He looks like a sleek teenager and is a master of the most minimal (but unmistakable) changes of expression. Simon says Marlo represents ‘that strange combination of self-love and ...”

“... in a way, for the picture-postcard commentary he has always been asked to provide. There was no Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg in space, but we have Buzz: ‘Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for ...”

“... wall and Scotland. Most striking are the claims made for a settled Roman presence in the Lowlands. Robert Sibbald, geographer royal for the kingdom of Scotland under Charles II, suggested that the barrier between civilisation and barbarity was not the Picts’ Wall but Graham’s Dyke (the later turf rampart, now known as the Antonine Wall, built 100 miles ...”

“... white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while there’s plenty of nastiness in the tale (how could there not be?), the overall impression Sabbag gives ...”

“... he was the natural prey of the rowing club but avoided having his sheets shredded when his friend Robert Byron repelled the would-be invaders, who ‘fell like nine pins before a barrage of champagne bottles flung … from a strategic position at the head of the stairs with a force and precision that radically changed the pattern of Oxford rowing for the rest ...”

“... now the standard work and must stand alongside Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, Ulrich Herbert’s Best and Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich as one of the landmark Nazi biographies. As the author of a celebrated study of the Holocaust, Longerich is better able than his predecessors to situate Himmler within the vast machinery of ...”

“... the Enlightenment as described by historians such as Cassirer, Gay, Daniel Mornet, Franco Venturi, Robert Darnton, John Marshall (and myself) – dissolves in Israel’s dialectical thinking. Israel sees two Enlightenments, one radical and good, the other moderate and of mixed value at best. Born and educated in Britain, now teaching in the United States, he ...”

“... referendum on independence in 2013 and instead moved to hold one in 2014, the 700th anniversary of Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English at the Battle of Bannockburn. Yet until Cameron’s intervention it wasn’t clear that Salmond was leading Scotland towards independence at all. While independence might have been a very long-term goal, he seemed ...”

“... had already happened, however ingenious and surprising, appealed to an inferior sort of curiosity. Robert Louis Stevenson saw detective fiction as ‘enthralling but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art’. Conan Doyle agreed. Detective fiction belonged to ‘a lower stratum of literary achievement’. That’s why he pleaded ...”