“... he free-associates: on the rubber air hoses used by traffic engineers to monitor passing cars, Robert Boyle’s General History of the Air, the vacuum in an unopened jar of peanut butter, playing the French horn, personal ventilation jets on planes (‘a participatory jet engine for each passenger’); he ruminates, too, on the paedomorphosis of pet ...”

“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because ...”

“... finance: namely, that the monarch became a taxpayer. In 1842, the then Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, reintroduced income tax, which had previously been levied on a temporary basis during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Queen was determined – or advised, the documentation is incomplete – that ‘her own income should be subject to a ...”

“... are ever as reluctant as this. This has a lot to do with Coppola’s astonishing troupe of actors: Robert Duvall, James Caan, Thalia Shire, Diane Keaton, Al Pacino. They make you feel not that this is the world of the Mafia, but that a dark world of family values, of murder and jollity and food and sentiment, can only be like this; and they make almost every ...”

“... even liberal, white males (Jack Kemp). The logic was simple enough. Starting off with Robert Dole, the quintessential tough-guy white male candidate, the wounded veteran (= ‘war hero’ in current parlance), a man’s man of few words, the Convention would have been a total failure if it had unfolded as a celebration of manly virtues. That would ...”

“... alone have the qualities which ensure success.’ The youthful and inexperienced naval officer Robert Scott was taken up by Markham and eventually given the job of reaching the Pole ahead of the suspiciously efficient Norwegian, Amundsen. There was talk of science to seal the legitimacy of the enterprise – meteorology, geomagnetism and mapping – but ...”

“... attributed to Hobbes, will be dismayed to find it re-attributed to one of his closest friends, Robert Payne. Another tract, of considerable importance as it has generally been taken to be Hobbes’s first major work of philosophy, the ‘Short Tract on First Principles’, has also recently been re-attributed to Payne, correctly in Malcolm’s ...”

“... is in for the kind of bashing which Posner delivers in one of his chapters to the writings of Robert Bork. President Reagan’s capable and ultra-conservative nominee for the Supreme Court whose rejection by the Senate resulted instead in the appointment of Clarence Thomas. Although legal literalism can crop up almost anywhere, its sharpest American ...”

“... upon the sensation or perception of daring, of breaking a law or flaunting a taboo. Like Robert Frost’s famous definition of free verse as “playing tennis with the net down”, what used to be called “free love” (extramarital, non-monogamous, ambisexual) needs rules to break.’ Thus, this part of the argument goes, we need to define ...”

“... which she joins young and old together by dramatising obsessive and almost psychotic continuities. Robert Kelway, the traitor hero from The Heat of the Day, who is giving away secrets to the enemy from his job at the War Office, is traced to his childhood in peculiarly prosperous and loveless suburban surroundings – or rather not traced, for Bowen is never ...”

“... a world rather than report on one. To those like the absurdly tortuous, sulky and by now moribund Robert de Montesquiou, quick to pick out members of his own plush acquaintance among the novel’s characters (though seemingly blind to any resemblance between himself and the monstrous Charlus, whom he sees rather as a descendant of Balzac’s sinister ...”

“... Cock is a steroid for the hormonal crisis currently under way in American bookshops. 1992 has Robert Bly and his middle-aged Boy Scouts leaping through forests dressed in feathers and pounding drums to scare the furry creatures, consecrate testosterone, and push the sale of Iron John. In Revolution From Within, Campfire Girl Gloria Steinem chronicles her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and New York. Having made his three-year promise, Roger Smith resigned. His successor, Robert Stempel, assigned four hundred of GM’s best brains and hundreds of millions of dollars to make the Impact roadworthy and salesworthy by 1998. By 1993 Stempel had also gone, but the firm was testing 30 ‘proof of concept’ cars, and releasing optimistic ...”

“... the younger scientists were warned that ‘it would be better not to work with Einstein,’ and Robert Oppenheimer reported to his family that ‘Einstein is completely cuckoo.’ One constructive consequence of Einstein’s opposition to quantum mechanics was that it forced Niels Bohr to formulate his ideas more precisely. In 1935, Einstein, Boris Podolsky ...”