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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from dry yellow vitriol ground up with saltpetre.In the 17th century, the corpuscular theories of Robert Boyle and others overtook alchemy, and a more mechanical philosophy made the magical universe redundant. The shift was, however, gradual. In the 1670s George Starkey, tutor to the young Boyle, published commentaries on Ripley, even as Ripley’s sericonian ...”

“... colonial war soon came to the rescue. In 1868, Nusserwanji Tata won a contract to supply General Robert Napier’s expeditionary forces in Abyssinia: Napier was leading an expedition against Emperor Tewodros II, who had asked for help quelling internal revolt and, receiving none, had taken hostage the British consul and a group of Europeans. Rescuing the ...”

“... enthusiastically about a range of artists of his own generation – from Paolozzi and Ed Ruscha to Robert Smithson and Ikko Narahara – as well as about younger figures including Tacita Dean and the Chapman brothers. His perspective was wildly idiosyncratic (he regretted that ‘no one ever … has an erection’ in the presence of a Damien Hirst) and his ...”

“... Ross into contact with the then-embryo Algonquin network. In 1919, George Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and the others were in their twenties and unknown. But they were wits, albeit at each other’s expense much of the time, and Ross watched with interest from the sidelines, every so often giving out ‘teamsterlike snorts’ of ...”

“... some reputation, now long gone, in the West. Marlene Dietrich fell to her knees before him; Robert Frost, visiting Moscow in 1962, made a point of seeking him out; he was touted for the Nobel Prize. I once owned an edition of the Selected Stories (from Progress Publishers, Moscow), ransomed from Foyles; my current copy is an on-demand Dutch reprint from ...”

“... of brilliant achievement in painting’ – in the secure hands of William Orpen, Laura Knight and Robert Anning Bell. (Now that Modernism is orthodoxy, we forget how marginal its initial hold was.) When, after the war and a period of personal troubles, Sickert returned to the critical fray, he had become the genial, roguish grandfather of art, indulgently ...”

“... in wilful collective hallucination, the abbey and its visitors mostly ignore them. As Robert Musil said, writing before BLM, ‘there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.’ The abbey’s audio guide – the English version is mellifluously narrated by Jeremy Irons – mentions them only in brief asides about Poets’ Corner and a ...”

“... as masterful as anything Malick had ever done. It felt like a religious picture or something Robert Bresson might have attempted, and in addressing the question of whether to be complicit with evil it led one towards a larger anxiety, that stories might lose their worth in a world close to ending. I do feel that there is in Malick’s work an ultimate ...”

“... tried to suppress the book and to buy up copies from bookshops. It’s almost a relief to turn to Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office until his vehement opposition to appeasement led Chamberlain to kick him upstairs to the House of Lords, who proposed a different enemy: Prussia and Prussianism. He told Lord Halifax that the war ...”

“... letters’ in an antique shop in Arezzo. Whether 19th-century or 21st, the tale has echoes of Robert Browning’s discovery in Florence in June 1860, at the market in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, of a collection of documents relating to a Roman murder case from 1698. ‘The old yellow book’, as Browning came to refer to it, formed the basis of his ...”

“... to circumnavigating the Earth 120 times.It isn’t known whether the albatross already belonged to Robert Edmond Grant when he started to put together his collection in 1827. Grant arrived in London that year from Edinburgh, where he had taught Charles Darwin and studied marine invertebrates with him in the Firth of Forth. All 12 of Grant’s brothers joined ...”

“... them as a robust prediction of relativity. Among the most important clarifications came from J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was teaching theoretical physics at Berkeley in the 1930s when he and a graduate student, Hartland Snyder, worked out what would happen to a star after it exhausted its nuclear fuel. With no more outward-directed pressure coming from ...”

“... back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling conflicting stories of exactly what had ...”