“... to these technological developments, and there are even attempts to downgrade their significance. Robert Kubicek argues that in numerous armed clashes between the British and local peoples between 1875 and 1907, ‘both sides had modern weaponry.’ So they did, but Winston Churchill was appalled by the one-sided slaughter at the Battle of Omdurman in ...”

“... of self-importance’. It attached even to his private writings, notably his surviving letters to Robert Harley, soon to be secretary of state and eventually unofficial prime minister. Harley rescued Defoe from Newgate, after he was convicted of seditious libel. He wanted to use him, and gave him a heady sense of influence over the times. For the first decade ...”

“... into the open in the US. With the exception of Donald Rumsfeld, who conveniently did his military service in the gap between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, neither Bush nor any of the other prime movers of this war served in the military. Of course, General Colin Powell served in Vietnam, but he is well known to be extremely dubious about attacking Iraq. All ...”

“... Invisible ink … Trampolines/aniseed sweets/painted eggs. Pencil sharpenings? Magic Faraway, Robert the something, Robert the Rose Horse?’ The bereaved man is convinced by this performance, even marginally consoled: ‘Thank you Crow.’ ‘All part of the ...”

“... reported his interrogation of two British officers to the Swiss Red Cross. As a result, Captain Robert MacGregor and Lt Capsis were accorded POW status, escaping the Sonderbehandlung – execution – of Commandos which was ordered by Hitler in October 1942. ‘Of course I knew about British Commandos,’ said Waldheim, ‘only I myself never interrogated ...”

“... more crazy if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. This is quoted in Robert Kee’s 1945 – The World We Fought For. Kee’s method is to construct an account of the year from contemporary newspapers and journals. Its vice is that it can look rather lazily tacked together. Its virtue is that it helps us to see events as the ...”

“... them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is said to be effectual in purging the Head, against ...”

“... Freud planned to use Charlie for his painting Interior at Paddington, but he was doing National Service, so instead he used Harry Diamond. At the time the painting was made, in 1951, Diamond was working as a stagehand and thus was free during the day. For six months, he stood as instructed in Freud’s studio. When he saw the painting, he said that his legs ...”

“... original publisher withdrew, and the judges quit in protest over his treatment. One of them was Robert Lowell, whom Seidel had interviewed for the Paris Review the previous year. Final Solutions, which was eventually published by Random House, is laboriously indebted to Lowell, though the poems often resemble what Randall Jarrell described as the ...”

“... years), that Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to rationalise the contents of his hoard after the fact, and concentrated instead on his subject’s social and business interests and his patronage of scientific research. Frances ...”

“... Jung ascribed to Hitler, is probably worse, and probably less probable. For those familiar with Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the question is whether we’re in the hands of the existential-fool murderer Moosbrugger or the supercilious and beguiling industrialist Arnheim. But why choose? We should consider the possibility that Trump and his ...”

“... to understand the aversion to this picture), ranging deftly over animal fur, a sparkling tea service with a Japanesque Royal Worcester pot, gilded pilasters and lattice ironwork grilles, a large Japanese birdcage hanging from the ceiling and a profusion of botanical trophies. Holding court is Tissot’s favourite model, the Irish divorcée Kathleen ...”

“... the world?Behavioural economics proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s. Its early adoptees included Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his research on asset price volatility and the psychology of bubbles. Economics and psychology are now closer than ever, with new fields like neuro-economics using fMRIs to map the way the brain processes ...”

“... aspect of the collecting of child pornography, according to Tate – whether or not in the service of a calculated disinhibition. The material is often carefully sorted and catalogued, a feature apparently so important for some paedophiles that they will masturbate over ‘a typed list of photographs’. It is well attested that the paedophiliac ...”

“... Now a literature professor at Princeton, the author as a young man trained for the US Naval Air Service in the war with Japan, and ended it on dive-bombers attacking the garrisons of Okinawa and Iwojima. His book gives a wonderfully intelligent and humane account of wartime life, neither distanced nor romanticised, and one that makes no effort to plug a ...”