“... writing: in addition to sermons preached by others, there were the law lectures ascribed to Robert Chambers, the parliamentary debates he ‘altered and disguised’ from others’ notes and published as ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and the ‘Last Solemn Declaration’ of Dr Dodd, the ‘macaroni parson’, who ...”

“... Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat Livingstone, at different times a seafarer, a window cleaner and a stagehand. According to their son, the couple hadn’t wanted children. Then one night in September 1944, Bob ran out of condoms. The memoirist writes of his conception, ‘With ...”

“... understand, are the pure products of disordered digestion’. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton wrote that the stomach is the ‘king of the belly, because if he be distempered, all the rest suffer with him.’ Early 19th-century physicians agreed: ‘It is a great mistake to regard dyspepsia as peculiarly or especially a disease of the ...”

“... history of the universe for ever, whatever the nature of time, and that this is vastly important. Robert Frost comes a long way with Johnston, but is, in the end, even more strict: ‘There is no future life to defer to. I see all salvation limited to here and now.’ It makes the heart sink most strangely to consider those who do nothing but good in ...”

“... and its urgency (perhaps neither of them especially Bishop-like qualities anyway), and the Robert Louis Stevenson or Hans Christian Andersen idea, now gone mousy and a little folksy, fails to survive.A Bishop poem (watch it closely) goes on looking long after one thinks it should have looked away – from having seen enough, from having got or given ...”

“... I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic ...”

“... mean that only oaths by the holy body were regarded as truly obscene in the 14th century. Robert of Brunne’s early 14th-century Handlyng Sinne does indeed have the Virgin say that those who swore by Christ’s body have torn the Christ child apart, and that thought is echoed by Chaucer’s Pardoner. But Chaucer’s actual representation of swearing ...”

“... is now writing a soon-to-be-bestselling crime novel with plenty of sex and murder. Her husband, Robert, often rudely called ‘Rob’ by unthinking friends, is a highly adapted commuting machine who works in Canary Wharf and times his drive to the station to perfection. She is interesting, he is not. And they have a child, Lanny, who is both interesting and ...”

“... it was the intrinsic prelude to any sort of European union. In his Declaration of 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister from 1948 to 1953, proposed in words drafted by Monnet, Pierre Uri and others, that ‘Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an ...”

“... first nights, she seldom fails to tell the producer or director how much she loathed the show. To Robert Evans, producer of Love Story, at the Royal Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts ...”

“... star playing a murderer if his character was seen to have been provoked. Bogart’s co-producer, Robert Lord, brokered the agreement: Bogart wouldn’t play a serial killer. He’d be a suspect, but someone else would be found guilty of those murders. However, he would crack under the pressure of suspicion and end up murdering his girlfriend. So in one ...”

“... it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert Dodsley recommended memorising it as an exercise in mental self-training. In Derzhypilsky’s production, having been performed beautifully in its familiar Q2 position in the third act, the soliloquy got an encore at the end of Act V when Hamlet, still not ...”

“... Winter’s Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and ...”

“... case, a technical prerequisite. You need an A-bomb to ignite an H-bomb, and the lab’s Director Robert Oppenheimer reasonably enough felt that the race to forestall the Nazis required no distractions from the main lines of development. Destructive friction between fusion and fission was reduced by giving Teller what was essentially a roaming brief, and it ...”

“... stopped years ago. My laboratory now tests its capabilities by using samples provided by the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. No one has asked me recently whether my electron microscope is still working. To be fair, guidelines are being prepared for action in the event of a deliberate release of smallpox. They assume that it is very unlikely to happen ...”