“... investigates the life and personality of the flakier of the two men who created AA in 1935. Robert Smith (‘Dr Bob’) was a proctologist, stolid by nature and a heavy drinker. William Wilson (‘Bill W.’) was a failed stockbroker and a fully-fledged dipsomaniac. At a Faustian moment in Akron’s Mayflower Hotel – poised between the bar and the ...”

“... even for a mega-rich guy. Newhouse wanted both respectability and profitability, and turned to Robert Gottlieb, editor-in-chief at Knopf (US publisher of Nobrow, for those keeping score), as the man to make this cocktail swirl. In a retrospect that is easy but exact, Seabrook sees Gottlieb as a transitional figure with a compromise strategy – to use ...”

“... predecessors. Others, including Halley and his London colleague, the irascible natural philosopher Robert Hooke, had the idea that orbiting bodies tended to move in straight lines while at the same time being pulled towards some force-centre. Only Newton fully exploited its implications. He defined forces by the changes they produced in the motions of bodies ...”

“... such as food aid and education, were inadequately related to the situation in the villages. Robert McNamara attributed the failure of the US in Vietnam to ‘a profound ignorance of the history, culture and politics of people in the area’. On these grounds a military disaster might have been expected in Afghanistan last year. Britain seemed better ...”

“... In the shopping precinct that now clings to the skirts of the old Reading Room, a table is laid with portable derivatives of the Rosetta Stone. The number of them hints at a BM merchandising frenzy: for sale, and I may have miscounted, are a mug, a mouse-mat, a ceramic tile, a tie, a teacloth, a scarf, a T-shirt and two sizes of replica, all of them stamped with a presumably random excerpt from the Stone’s inscriptions ...”

“... his career were household names: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Marco Pierre White and Elton John, Robert Maxwell and Richard Branson. There were also memorable victories against Jonathan Aitken on behalf of the Guardian and Neil Hamilton on behalf of Mohammad Al-Fayed. Aitken sued over various allegations, ranging from a claim that he was financially ...”

“... kept by Wren’s close colleague on the London churches scheme, the brilliant natural philosopher Robert Hooke. ‘Eat with great stomack,’ Hooke recorded after one pub dinner with Wren and the churchwardens of St Stephen Walbrook. Like Wren, the energetically obsessive Hooke combined the Vitruvian careers of arts, experiment and architecture. He designed ...”

“... a piece of double-entry book-keeping of the soul, or as a spiritual equivalent to the microscope Robert Hooke was using in the 1660s to count the hairs on a flea’s leg. What makes Pepys matter as a writer is the fact that he is a man totting up his sins before God, and a man out to take sexual favours and greedily sum them up, and a man who works ...”

“... of wealth acquisition that thrives on inequality, but leaves no one better off. Twenty years ago Robert Frank wrote a brilliant book about the quest for status, Choosing the Right Pond, and Offer’s contribution brings Frank’s analysis up to date. We run faster and faster, for longer and longer, just to keep up. And it isn’t only about status. As Fred ...”

“... children and sell the paintings off the walls in amorous pursuit of first, the then undergraduate Robert Kee and second, the egomaniacal and usually drunken Dylan Thomas. Even thirty years later, Taylor recalled this period as ‘a decade of intense, almost indescribable misery’, and it is impossible to contemplate the blighted hopes and bewildered children ...”

“... suppose and admire, and upon occasion celebrate, but do not call in question or discuss.’ Thus Robert Boyle, progenitor of English science, in A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, 1686. Boyle found eight meanings for the word, and pretty much suggested we scrap the lot. No one paid him any heed. Nature is too deeply entrenched in our ...”

“... is no coincidence that travel writers on Central Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier travels. His interest in the ...”

“... this was the precise context for the legal ruling of caveat emptor – and one of the reasons Robert Boyle included bezoars in his experiments on determining specific gravity was to distinguish true from counterfeit stones. The British East India Company wanted bezoars so much that they were joined at the top of their shopping list only by ...”

“... honest God is the noblest work of man,’ observed the great 19th-century American agnostic Robert Ingersoll. Parodying Alexander Pope, Ingersoll offered his ironic support to a liberal Protestant theology that he judged less destructive than its orthodox predecessors. He understood the liberal Protestant God to sympathise with advances in ...”

“... cheating husband and 12 bought witnesses alone at midnight in her bedroom with the young surgeon Robert Adair, she was subsequently convicted of adultery. Matthew got the divorce he had long desired and done his best to enable by, as Clarke puts it, ‘tormenting her at home and blackening her name out of it’. Swift tried to erase her name from all his ...”