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“... Such classic studies as W.L. Bragg’s solutions of the structures of the common minerals, or Sir Robert Robinson’s elucidation of the chemical formulae of the flower pigments, did involve imaginative guesswork, but coupled to intellection of the highest order. Those were fantastic feats of puzzle-solving. Great feats of the intellect are surely the very ...”

“... for a few hundred feet? How do you explain the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth, and the American Robert Goddard, who pursued the mad ambition of space with rockets that lifted themselves only a few yards, before collapsing under their own contradictions? Even more remarkable are the interlinked stories of the two men who actually took humans into ...”

“... lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in the same year. A similar weariness infuses the faces of Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard in their 1944 portraits; but the relationship between these ...”

“... shark maestro, Sonny Gruber; Boris Worm, doyen of fisheries conservation ecology; and Jeffrey Carrier, who has, ‘most likely, viewed more shark sex than any other researcher in the world’. Each of these people, as the convention requires, is given a perky little pen portrait: ‘Maclean is a blunt-spoken, stocky bleached blonde who’s spent years ...”

“... reader, Professor Morrisone (Mr Morrison in civvy street), tells Alma that she is a very strong ‘carrier’ of ectoplasm, the substance with which some mediums materialise spirits. Alma’s older sister, Doris, their mum and Alma’s best friend, Rose (the lodger’s sister-in law) come and go, downing innumerable cups of tea, some of them flying from ...”

“... Wilder if this is ‘an optical effect’. Wilder says: ‘The focus gets thrown out by the focus carrier. I left the camera running. I didn’t know where to cut.’ He is being a little disingenuous here, but he is also telling us something. This blurred face, like the clear calm face of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, is the face of a woman who, with ...”

“... around the world’.Perhaps the most significant commitment was the deployment of a new aircraft carrier group in ‘the Indo-Pacific’, which would be ‘permanently available to Nato’. One of the carriers set out for the South China Sea at the end of May. British politicians were persuaded to spend £7.6 billion on the new vessels, HMS Queen Elizabeth ...”

“... enemy but because it was the home of many of the world’s greatest physicists, the country where Robert Oppenheimer and others had gone to do graduate work, and where fission had been discovered. In December 1938, Otto Hahn, Germany’s leading radiation chemist, and his student Fritz Strassmann, profiting from the experimental work of Irène and Frédéric ...”

“... without being confined to them. But larger centres have their filmographies too: Marseille in Robert Guédiguian’s movies; Bordeaux in Moderato cantabile, Nice in Baie des anges; Lyon in Melville’s L’Armée des ombres; Lille in Zonca’s La Vie rêvée des anges. In such cases, the location of novels and films is precise and explicit, each accorded ...”

“... not straight ethnography, however: Segalen had a case to make, the same case that Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson had made before him, against the degradation of native life which had set in, first with the coming of Christian missionaries to the islands early in the 19th century, and then with the onset of a colonial administration. The Maoris had ...”

“... intended to harm Palestinian civil society’. In December the American political scientist Robert Pape described it as ‘one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history’.What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey ...”

“... Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards Vietnam, and he wanted Ellsberg to take charge of the day-to-day details. Ellsberg, then 33 years old, was appointed at the exalted civil service grade of GS-18, equivalent in ...”

“... for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and no ...”

“... entirely appropriate to his base, the 35 to 40 per cent of the electorate who remain unmoved by Robert Mueller’s recent arrests. It also reflects an indisputable reality: the progressive erosion of checks and balances on presidential war-making power. The president is now understood as the sovereign who decides, not just for the United States, but, given ...”

“... publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable ...”