“... was lucky: syphilis did not carry him off in his prime. Consider the 19th-century Scottish surgeon Robert Liston, ‘tall . . . powerful . . . dressed in dark bottle-green coat with velvet collar . . . grey trousers and Wellington boots, thumb stuck in the armhole of his vest . . . chewing a tooth pick’, and famous for conducting the first major operation ...”

“... 2002) was the army chief of staff, Eric Shinseki. Shinseki has been portrayed in the media and service hagiography as a martyr who spoke truth to power and sacrificed his career in consequence. The record – Rumsfeld is happy to lay it out in detail – shows that Shinseki cautiously observed in a Senate hearing just a month before the war that ‘several ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... without noticing it. The first European to discover the Mississippi from the sea was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was assisted by local Indian guides in 1682. On a riverbank several days upstream La Salle shouted ‘Vive le Roi!’ and claimed the Mississippi Basin for Louis XIV. He named the vast territory, amounting to a third of the ...”

“... Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was fascinated by the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the godfather of modern magic, so when he and Dash put their tricks out to work, at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they performed as the Houdini Brothers: with their thick black hair and swarthy complexions they didn’t ...”

“... naivety. He did not know that Diana loathed the Palace apparatchiks (including her brother-in-law, Robert Fellowes, who was the Queen’s private secretary). Nor did he know that she cultivated her own contacts with the press, both directly and through her friends. Since he thought Fellowes must enjoy Diana’s confidence, he accepted without question his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his ‘experimental geography’ draws on the precedent of the ‘site-nonsite’ artwork of Robert Smithson in order to respond to Fredric Jameson’s call for a ‘cognitive mapping’ of advanced capitalism. In the process Paglen also suggests a model of photography that turns the influential account of Roland Barthes on its head: rather than the ...”

“... and precocious Mary Ward, later better known as Mrs Humphry Ward, author of the hugely successful Robert Elsmere (1888). Through the good offices of her uncle, Matthew Arnold, she met Renan in Paris, and thanks to the patronage of John Morley she reviewed his autobiography in Macmillan’s Magazine. Renan’s conception of the ethical character of Jesus ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... films of the 1950s, for that matter – and no gay characters either (although Dennis Price and Robert Hamer, the star and director of Kind Hearts and Coronets, were both gay). The quintessential ‘Englishness’ so often lauded in these films wasn’t total: throughout his book, Stubbs is unusually attentive to the musical content of screen comedy, and he ...”

“... divine creation and predetermined natural order through empirical evidence.’ Buffon paid lip service to Church doctrine only in order to preserve his elevated social position. Condorcet was an atheist. Grégoire supported the disestablishment of Roman Catholicism and became a bête noire of French Catholics. Sieyès considered organised religion ‘the ...”

“... If you look around you in the Tube you may see someone, usually a man, reading a thriller by Robert Ludlum, or someone else, usually a woman, making her way through one of Catherine Cookson’s romances. On a good day there will be one person reading a novel by Anita Brookner. But that’s about it. Among those who don’t travel on the Tube, the ...”

“... the Church, his brother Jacques as an intermediary with the Army, and promoted another brother, Robert, to a leading foreign-trade position. Both Jacques and Robert went on to become enormously rich industrial magnates. In addition, Mitterrand appointed Jean-Christophe’s mother-in-law as a deputy Minister of ...”