“... endowed them. Before long Gay’s scrupulous historical habits began to spread, and by 1979, when Robert Darnton investigated the relationship between the Encyclopédie and the book trade in The Business of Enlightenment, it was clear that the study of 18th-century thought was changing out of recognition. From now on it would belong to professional historians ...”

“... Eritrea’s war of independence, waged against its imperial neighbour Ethiopia, lasted 30 years and ended in 1991. Often, in the British media, the case against covering the conflict was that if no one had heard of it, it couldn’t be worth the trouble. That kind of argument, which plumps the cushions for the proof to lie on, is hard to counter. Telling the story to a wide non-specialist audience is a daunting prospect and few people have tried; the most successful, until now, was Thomas Keneally, whose novel Towards Asmara (1989), set in the guerrilla-held areas at the time of the liberation war, was a picaresque homage to the Eritrean people ...”

“... prudent wait-and-see attitude from his observation post in Massachusetts. Unlike her predecessor, Robert Gottlieb, spatula’d out of the editor’s chair after five years, Brown wooed Updike, treating him to lunch at the Four Seasons, packed with men in power suits. The most Gottlieb ever offered was a sandwich in his office.Updike’s faith would be sorely ...”

“... made in the Caymans in the late 1960s. The book polarised reviewers. In the New York Times alone, Robert Stone said ‘its pleasures are many and good for the soul,’ while Anatole Broyard called it an ‘unrelieved bore’. Its formal experimentation had put Matthiessen at loggerheads with his editor at Random House, Joe Fox, who had done much to perfect ...”

“... of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and, Tennyson told Moxon, before its sensationalist precursor, Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, came out in 1844. Holmes is sceptical about this, thinking that Tennyson must have been reacting to Chambers’s observation that, within evolution, ‘the Individual … is to the Author of ...”

“... young.Ageism itself is a relatively recent concept. The term was coined by the gerontologist Robert Butler in 1969 to describe routine discrimination against the elderly, who had been left behind in the great wave of civil rights movements of the 1960s. Butler drew on the struggle against racial and other forms of injustice to make his case. He invoked ...”

“... Bindel called it in 2018 when the Olympic diver Tom Daley announced the arrival of his baby son, Robert, by paid surrogate in California. ‘The interface between extreme capitalism and patriarchy.’ It’s interesting, as Lewis is quick to notice, that the clouds of pale and puffy human-rights speak come spiked with moments of body horror, as though ...”

“... of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. Southmere Lakeside and the soothing water features contrived by Robert Rigg as part of a GLC initiative in the 1960s had turned sour by the time of Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Dystopian violence overcame the innocence of Corbusier-influenced architects and planners hoping for a brutalist iteration ...”

“... to work.In testimony before the Senate, where many of the Republicans pointedly do not wear masks, Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, admits that the failure even to attempt ‘containment’ in late January, February and March – as South Korea and other nations had done – led to ‘mitigation’ (shutting down the country). This, of course, is contrary ...”

“... tune of about £650,000. Between Agnew’s place and Sandringham is Houghton Hall, family seat of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... the bodies of your friends. Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids ...”

“... notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s urging. Almost certainly, after the Spanish Civil War, he seemed to ...”

“... sounds very simple: put up shacks and hideaways in places so obvious that nobody will notice them. Robert Macfarlane, who lodged in a black hut assembled by urban explorers wearing orange hi-viz overalls during the fuss of the London Marathon, called his windowless shelter an ‘urban bothy’. The crew survey the territory as thoroughly as the developers with ...”

“... to be, a collector of literary young men (‘These Gardners are the kind that hunt lions,’ Robert Frost, her next target, said). She was acting for her daughter in this matter. Months later, Brooke offered to have lunch with Mrs Gardner. Phyllis went too and was entranced, ‘carried along on a kind of irresistible current’. She knew nothing of his ...”