“... doe give most odorous smell,/but her sweet odour did them all excel.’None of this appears in Robert Muchembled’s Smells, whose lively account is much indebted to his compatriot Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant (published in an English translation in 1986) and is almost entirely confined to the history of odours in France. He makes no ...”

“... my period, but despite some convincing quotation and an authenticating footnote, this work by ‘Robert of St Victor’ appears to be invented. (Readers of Wilson’s earlier novels will expect highly specialised pockets of expertise on church and university matters.) The treatise celebrates the anchoretic life: or the wisdom of virginity as the path to true ...”

“... He was a pioneer interpreter of and midwife to theatre work by Clifford Odets, Sam Behrman, Robert Ardrey, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Robert Anderson and William Inge. He did the same in the cinema with Williams, Robert Sherwood, Inge, Steinbeck and Schulberg. Though he ...”

“... Frye celebrated the literary rediscovery of Scripture in The Great Code, and now Frank Kermode and Robert Alter, two critics who have given a new rigour and seriousness to the ‘Bible as literature’ movement, have brought together a constellation of literary and Biblical specialists, from both sides of the Atlantic, to explain the Bible from a literary ...”

“... reputation – is rarely adopted by British historians, and its purpose is an intriguing one. Sir Robert Peel was the son of a leading industrial capitalist, gentrified by his triumphant progress through Harrow and Christ Church, and by his family’s purchase of a landed estate. Like many other nouveaux riches in early 19th-century Britain, he became a Tory ...”

“... serving a six-month prison sentence, and virtually without medical support. Again, a Florida man, Robert Randall, who had contracted Aids following a blood transfusion, had, with great difficulty, obtained legal authorisation to use cannabis to reduce the nausea he suffered. He, too, was arrested at gunpoint, tried and convicted on a charge of growing ...”

“... hands privately. I thought this was common knowledge but in Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class Robert Lacey assures us that there had never been a ‘tradition of selling ... classic, museum-quality masterpieces at auction – at Christie’s or anywhere else’ before the end of the First World War, when Sotheby’s and Christie’s became rivals in ...”

“... cut. The quotation ends with ‘What unfailing taste he possessed’ – full stop.) Jarrell, as Robert Lowell once observed, was actually more of a eulogist than a destroyer and it was in the realm of eulogy that his weakness for near-spluttering exaggeration was at its most off-putting. When Jarrell admired a writer, that writer had to be vaunted to the ...”

“... the law officers perhaps doubted whether the more serious charge would hold up. The trials of Robert Watt and David Downie, which revealed parallel plots for insurrection in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, set a more direct precedent. They were the first trials for high treason to take place in Scotland since the 1351 statute had become law there. The ...”

“... the South Pole. From 1913, when the news arrived of his death in the snow, until the late 1970s, Robert Falcon Scott’s reputation was frozen as the apotheosis of duty, Britishness and the selfless, good death. Then, just in time for the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s brash, commercial vision of what ‘British’ was supposed to mean, Roland Huntford ...”

“... the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set eyes on him. Undeterred, Godwin determined to introduce himself to ...”

“... David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so far-fetched, since Hutchinson tells us that Cromwell was responsible for transforming the England ...”

“... came to power 20 years later, he formally rehabilitated Bukharin. Not Trotsky, however (though Robert Service oddly implies the contrary): like most other Soviet Communists, Gorbachev still had the instinctive revulsion against him acquired in his youth. Even in 1987, he still regarded Trotsky as the quintessential anti-Leninist, though he did allow him to ...”

“... Robert Wistrich’s book is about the Jews of Vienna in their golden age, Steven Beller’s about the city’s culture in its golden age. You could be forgiven for thinking that these amounted to the same thing. Not all Viennese Jews were cultural heroes, and not all Viennese cultural heroes were Jews. But the overlap is impressive and in need of explanation ...”

“... in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by several serious poets (Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Ed Dorn are those who come to mind) – that the North American imagination is beginning to define its identity no longer on a West-East axis, across the Atlantic to ...”