“... piece of evidence to that effect came in 2011, with the public victory of a project called Watson, run by IBM. The idea behind Watson was to build a computer that could understand ordinary language well enough to win a popular TV quiz show called Jeopardy!, playing against not just ordinary contestants, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by Mark Thornton Burnett’s edition of the plays for Everyman in 1999, and Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey’s for Penguin in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the biographers’ Marlowe is ...”

“... very different from his partner and fellow editor, whose money kept Horizon going. This was Peter Watson, one of the heirs to a margarine fortune, a gentle, tormented, highly cultivated man whose contribution to the success of the magazine was, as Shelden indicates, by no means limited to financial support. Unfortunately he needed and lived with a series of ...”

“... 1960s, the comic-book landscape was being altered by the ‘underground comix’ movement, led by Robert Crumb. Among Crumb’s most popular creations are the suave adventurer Fritz the Cat (whose conquests include a female ostrich and his own sister) and Mr Natural, a fountainhead of exasperatingly vague advice, outfitted in a Tolstoyan beard and ...”

“... not actually married to K, has baby Nicolette, K going off to Balkans, now J falling in love with Robert Kee, who spends weekend at Ham Spray, F. Partridge approves,’ and so on. Sometimes it all seemed very distant and unimportant. And as for Frances Partridge’s approval, I think I would have gone a long way to avoid spending a weekend at Ham Spray (that ...”

“... but does its value lie as much in admonition as in tribute? According to the late ecologist Adam Watson, Shepherd was ‘a snob towards most working-class folk’. In a 2016 review, he described The Living Mountain as ‘fanciful, contrived and fundamentally anthropocentric’ and complained that ‘she did not know the Braemar area or its folk ...”

“... movement is now probably best remembered by the outstanding writers associated with it, such as Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men), John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, even Robert Lowell, who literally pitched his tent on Tate’s lawn. All of these must have responded warmly to ...”

“... back-lit, his dishevelled white hair glowing like a saintly halo. Or the gaunt stick-figure of Robert Oppenheimer in his last years, hair close-cropped – a starving Buddha, worn down by political persecution and the atomic scientist’s ‘knowledge of sin’. Even now, the cover of A Brief History of Time sets a tiny, and almost literally ...”

“... central part in the revolution in molecular biology that one might have expected seems inferior to Robert Olby’s in his entry for Bernal in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and he shows insufficient interest in the thinking that turned so many eminent figures in the evolutionary life sciences to Marxism, or rather, more surprisingly, to the ...”

“... as a 15-year-old, on learning that the Captain of my house, the immensely talented Paul Graham-Watson, had been killed by guerrilla forces in the Malayan jungle, that my friend George Ponsonby had been killed in an armoured-car accident in BAOR, and that Tony Pugh and Nick Wadham had been killed flying with the RAF on National Service. Adult behaviour was ...”

“... who eluded her too amorous suitor by hiding among pigs, stands the funerary monument of Robert Burton. Already, it will be noticed, I am giving more information than is strictly necessary. My excuse must be that it is a habit I have caught from Burton himself. A schoolboy, asked to produce a review, is said to have written: ‘This book tells me ...”

“... and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast ...”

“... later, Freud cut the Spender poems out of the book, ‘deeming them superfluous’.) Peter Watson, who funded Horizon, also began to enjoy Freud’s company. ‘He helped me very much, looked at my pictures and bought things and gave me money and books,’ Freud said. ‘He had pictures that I liked and learned from, very good things … He had a ...”

“... This accomplishment opened the door for the synthesis of all the major glucoside anthocyanins. Robert Robinson, his professor, was rated something of a genius in synthetic organic chemistry, and the paragraphs in which Alex Todd describes Robinson’s research strategy are among the most valuable in his book. Todd completed the synthesis of a number of ...”