“... Was there nobody more interesting? More talented? It’s as though Coleridge had stuck with Robert Southey and never met Wordsworth. Why should a writer such as Flaubert, always so fiercely self-assured in his literary judgments, submit to being guided and corrected by the lesser man? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that their friendship was ...”

“... diverse group with impressive credentials: for example, the former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Lord Michael Carver, the former chief of the British Defence Staff; Bruce Blair, who has written extensively about nuclear command and control issues; Fred Iklé, who headed the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Ford; and ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... induces a quasi-philosophic calm. The French term ‘nature morte’ (the first use recorded in Robert is from 1752) and the English ‘still life’ (which was being used at the end of the 17th century) have different connotations despite being derived from the same Dutch word – stilleven. On the one hand, autumnal abundance, the fruits of the ...”

“... can, it seems, make excellent translations on any principle at all, free or literal or in between. Robert Lowell was cruelly and unjustly pilloried by Nabokov for his wonderful ‘imitations’ of Rimbaud, Rilke and others. But then Nabokov’s literal version of Eugene Onegin has all kinds of virtues, and is itself routinely pilloried by almost everyone who ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... presented to King Louis-Philippe at the Château St-Cloud in 1846 by the renowned French magician Robert-Houdin. An account can be found in his Memoirs: I borrowed from my noble spectators several handkerchiefs which I made into a parcel and laid on the table. Then at my request different persons wrote on the cards the names of the places whither they ...”

“... been the glory of classical art – was one of the big issues of those days, and the artist-critic Robert Smithson had great fun with Fried’s finding that certain polychrome sculptures by the painter Jules Olitski consisted of surfaces that had the miraculous property of being ‘flat, but rolled’. Speaking of the American painters he championed in the ...”

“... it to keep his pills in, it’s as if he were getting stripped for action, or being barbered like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver. (It’s also a sumptuous image of death, rather ahead of Dalí.) I want, if I can, to avoid saying what happens then: suffice it to say, it is cleverly spun out, attended by false alarms and dry runs (‘a majestic police constable ...”

“... like some of the sources used by orthodox contemporary histories of the Transportation System. Robert Hughes’s discussion of the Port Arthur penal colony could almost be a description of Jorgensen’s chronicle – although Hughes’s tone, predictably, is rather less admiring than Gould’s: To scrutinise the punishment records . . . is to look into a ...”

“... she said to him on one of his early weekends, surprised to see his mail addressed to the Hon. Robert Brand. Brand fell in love with Phyllis, and watched in agony as she flirted with Pennant and several other men. (She was a ‘callous and provocative allumeuse’.) He saw himself and his friend Kerr as inept at wooing. All the same, two years after ...”

“... to disagree, but they, too, have been won over by the sheer energy of the fifty-overs game. Robert Winder’s Hell for Leather is an account of a trip to India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 1996, when these countries were staging the World Cup.* Winder found a subcontinent in love with cricket. The contrast with England could not have been more ...”

“... connected) had crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Trevelyan, Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited him ‘with the face of a Botticelli’). In April 1915, Mallory wrote to ...”

“... then use other methods to navigate the surrounding genetic territory. This technique has allowed Robert Plomin and his colleagues to localise what they consider to be an ‘intelligence gene’ – a factor affecting the variation in g scores in a sample of Ohio schoolchildren. Unfortunately, Ridley assumes that the marker used by Plomin (a gene called ...”

“... told the 1923 Labour Party Conference that the founder of British socialism was not Karl Marx but Robert Owen, who ‘preached not “class war”, but the ancient doctrine of human brotherhood’. Baldwin’s consistent rhetorical subordination of politics to religion and ethics was a particular asset in winning over the traditionally Liberal forces of ...”