“... 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 ...”

“... and humanitarianism. The formula of ‘reasonable anti-semitism’ was best formulated in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, who saw himself as a ‘moderate’ anti-semite: We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio ...”

“... movement, which reduced union leaders’ ability to moderate the pay demands of their members. As Robert Taylor observes in his contribution to Crines and Hickson’s book, the unions were too weak institutionally to play the role Wilson required of them; and their historic commitment to free collective bargaining was irreconcilable with the corporatist ...”

“... Happy Moscow, was never published in his lifetime, though it now has a fine English translation by Robert Chandler. The eponymous Moscow is a woman, not the city, though she floats around it doing some characteristic 1930s-Moscow things like parachute jumping (insouciantly lighting a cigarette in mid-flight) as well as having various dead-end love affairs in a ...”

“... Suffering from crippling pains in the head and advancing paranoia, he conceived a vendetta against Robert Peel, then prime minister, bought pistols, travelled to London and, though apparently intending to assassinate Peel, fatally shot his private secretary Edward Drummond. ‘The Tories in my native city have compelled me to do this,’ he claimed in ...”

“... can open the doors of his face?’ Magnified two hundred times, he is the louse in Robert Hooke’s ...”

“... by that of their mother and they represented a form of capital accumulation for slave owners. Robert Wedderburn, a radical agitator and Unitarian preacher, provides one of the few voices articulating the sense of loss, bitterness and anger aroused by these ugly practices of power. His pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery, written as an act of restitution to ...”

“... enjoyed by elected representatives. The leading theorist of democracy in the 20th century, Robert Dahl of Yale, was happier with the term ‘polyarchy’ – the rule of the many – as a description of the way democracy functioned; a responsive system which enables the inclusive, procedural reconciliation of multiple interest groups. Dahl’s ...”

“... elaborate fantasies. To me he seemed downright satanic at every turn. He also put me in mind of Robert De Niro in Heat, delivering a professional bank robber’s answer to a cop who asks him if he ever intends to go back to prison: ‘You see me doing thrill-seeker liquor store hold-ups with a born-to-lose tattoo on my chest?’ Sommer was nearly that ...”

“... treated his heroine without mercy. In The Testament of Cresseid, a sequel by the Scots poet Robert Henryson, Cresseid is reduced to prostitution and – by counsel of the gods – stricken with leprosy. Chaucer borrowed the plots of both ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and Troilus and Criseyde from Boccaccio, who was still alive during his first trip to ...”

“... St Guinefort, patron saint for the protection of children. Many sainted characters dream of bliss: Robert Browne, an 18th-century astronomer, of the young Jesus getting into bed with him; St Catherine of Siena of marrying Jesus, who gives her his foreskin for a ring (the lack of self-awareness among our pre-Freudian forebears is prelapsarian; these nocturnal ...”

“... remained in place and were quickly overwhelmed by local militia and a contingent of Marines led by Robert E. Lee. But Brown’s demeanour at his trial for treason, where he cited the Bible as his inspiration, and his subsequent execution, made him a martyr in the eyes of many Northerners. He had made the gallows ‘as glorious as the cross’, Ralph Waldo ...”

“... as often as through the calculations of strangers.’ She has very good things to say about Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992) too, in which the Germans win the war and cover up the Holocaust. The novel keeps testing the difference between not knowing of such matters and not caring about them: ‘Indifference,’ Gallagher says, ‘is the modality of ...”