“... business to subsequent generations. His favourite daughter, Sukey, married Erasmus Darwin’s son Robert, and their son, Charles Darwin, imbibed his grandparents’ experimentalism and willingness to challenge convention. Darwin’s interest in evolution and inheritance may also have been influenced by his family’s health troubles. He married his first ...”

“... underpin a global system of racialised capitalism and imperial power.In September 1665 the banker Robert Viner gave Pepys a tour of his palatial mansion and proudly showed him a cadaver: ‘a black boy that he had, that died of a consumption, and being dead, he caused him to be dried in an oven, and lies there entire in a box’. On another occasion a group ...”

“... account to the chancellor of the University of Paris.‘It was 1420; experience was crumbling,’ Robert Glück writes in his experimental novel Margery Kempe (1994), in which he fuses his affair with an aloof younger man with Margery’s love for Jesus. You might say that Glück channels Margery channelling Christ. Glück asked friends in his circle to write ...”

“... When Americans test the health of their republic, scrutinise the civic virtue of their fellow citizens, or worry that religion is playing too large or too small a role in public life, the text from which they draw their standards of political health and psychological well-being, and the text from which they draw their hopes and fears is a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old treatise written by a French aristocrat of 30 who had spent barely nine months in the country ...”

“... Carpenter skilfully weaves the friends – Connolly, Betjeman, Anthony Powell, Brian Howard, Robert Byron – into a completed composition, the others serve chiefly to start a scene or two and swell the progress of Waugh himself. Of course this gives a misleading picture of period and individuals, but that is in a sense the object of the exercise, for ...”

“... the plot of his The Europeans of 1878, replacing his Baroness with the Countess Olenska and Robert Acton with Newland Archer; and it finds a value in sacrificial paradoxes like ‘I can’t love you unless I give you up,’ words by which, as Karl Miller remarks, ‘James might have been moved’. The book’s manner is more like that of early than of ...”

“... under way in Britain, with contributions by Yorkshire Television, Lords Devlin and Scarman, and Robert Kee. Irish public opinion, provincial to the last, finally fell in behind its UK counterpart. What is most unexpected about the Hill and Conlon books, perhaps, is the intensity of their descriptions of prison life. Innocence may sharpen the memory: at all ...”

“... of Noam Chomsky, unjustly pilloried, Hitchens feels, for having written a preface to a book by Robert Faurisson. Faurisson is one of the nest of ‘revisionist’ historians to be found at the University of Lyon (which Hitchens insists on misspelling as Lyons) who believe that the Holocaust was a hoax got up to blacken Hitler’s good name. Not ...”

“... not to mention new EC rules on such things as competition and public purchasing. Moreover, as Robert Reich has argued, capital is now so international and cosmopolitan that it is meaningless for governments to concentrate solely on supporting national capital. There is no obvious reason why the US Government should spend its energy advocating greater ...”

“... But why, at this point in our culture, do we choose to invoke the dog, the ‘prime secret’ of Robert Graves’s druidic triad? Why, by granting it attention, do we need to indulge this elemental whose jaw, once locked, has to be broken open with a specially-contrived wedge? ‘The first beast was like a lion ... and they were full of eyes within.’ Eyes ...”

“... is Pierre Berton in The Arctic Grail. Berton accepts the challenge with a boldness worthy of a Robert M’Clure or a James Clark Ross. Not only does he tell the story of the Franklin Expedition and the search for it, he tells the story of all Arctic exploration in the 19th century in three overlapping stages: the search for the Northwest Passage, the ...”

“... for authoritarian corruption. In his rather wonderful new essay ‘The Culture of Complaint’, Robert Hughes addresses the radical counterpart of this ‘culture war’ and marvels that after the 1989 revolution: ‘The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps ...”

“... that transcends class and sectarian interest. ‘The ideal of a Liberal party,’ said Robert Lowe in 1877, ‘consists in a view of things undisturbed and undistorted by the promptings of interest or prejudice, in a complete independence of all class interests, and in relying for its success on the better feelings and higher intelligence of ...”

“... is too highbrow. Instead of Germaine Greer, there is Navratilova. When a poet does scrape in, like Robert Frost, all one needs to know is that he was famous, not why. Success matters more than states of the soul; the successsful are the pagan gods of ordinary life. The reader is judged to need ‘real’ facts, the kind Mrs Thatcher wants schoolchildren to be ...”

“... in the quantum mechanics enthusiasm of several of the brilliant young scientists – they included Robert Oppenheimer, Pascual Jordan and Victor Weisskopf – who had come to the university to pursue the new theory. ‘I learned at an early age that science is a haven for the timid, the freaks, the misfits,’ Delbrück later mused: ‘If you were a student in ...”