“... Robert Schumann died in an asylum near Bonn in 1856, having committed himself there two years before, following a suicidal plunge into the Rhine near his home in Düsseldorf. He had had many periods of depression and anxiety before that, and biographers have tended to regard his life as a continuous fight against the congenital mental instability to which the deaths of his sister and father when he was in his teens have also been attributed ...”

“... artistic gift’, and suggested that the work was written as though ‘by an alter ego, by another man in the same skin, one who watched understandingly but rather detachedly the behaviour and motives of his fellow-lodger’. These words were penned by Robert Latham’s collaborator, William ...”

“... without the intervention of experiments that might show such a theory to be highly presumptuous, Robert Laughlin cautions against searching ‘on smaller and smaller scales for meaning that is not there’. Laughlin’s central argument is that instead of becoming obsessed with ultimate theories we would do better to focus on those properties of matter that ...”

“... modern age – such is the view propagated in different guises by the French republican tradition. Robert Darnton’s objective, in this collection of essays, is to disturb the serenity of the dinner party, to bring the historian of ideas or the literary scholar down from the noble summits to the murky depths of Enlightenment. His particular concern is with ...”

“... encounters are played for laughs, they aren’t dismissed as fraudulent. The effort to expand or alter consciousness can be funny but is always taken seriously. Hoban mostly manages to avoid the mistakes of contemporaries similarly smitten with alternatives to the hyper-rational world. He didn’t pose as a guru like Ken Kesey, Carlos Castaneda or ...”

“... thought that the velocity of circulation (the frequency with which money changes hands) would alter in response to interest-rate changes brought about by changes in the money supply. If this occurred, there was no need for the price level to alter. Friedman accepted that changes in the interest rate on bonds could in ...”

“... is landscape painting,’ began work on the house and grounds at Twickenham which he continued to alter and write about for the rest of his life. Gardening of this sort was not only painting, it was also from the outset poetry, philosophy and politics. Pope had moved, first to Chiswick in 1715 and then to Twickenham, to be ‘under the wing of my Lord ...”

“... John Field, whose Bibles were so inaccurate that he was later suspected of taking bribes to alter the text in Acts, worked in relative harmony with the Stationers, collaborating with London printers; Hayes’s press was in the end sold to CUP and he became its salaried employee. A second story, more explicitly bibliographical, follows the methods and ...”

“... depreciated by Apollo, the god of poetry. At the beginning of the sixth Eclogue, Virgil’s alter ego Tityrus is about to sing of kings and battles when Apollo tweaks his ear and tells him that a shepherd ought to feed up his sheep to be fat but keep his poems spare. Virgil here is adapting a famous passage written just over two centuries earlier by the ...”

“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth ...”

“... manipulation. The contrast between these two views is perhaps brought out most clearly in Robert Trivers’s seminal article from 1974 on the conflict between parents and offspring. A natural theologian is likely to assume that parents and their developing offspring are engaged in a largely harmonious project, directed at the efficient production of a ...”

“... was not accepted at once. Dyson was now joining the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Robert Oppenheimer, its director, at first refused to believe in the new theories, or in Dyson’s exposition. Oppenheimer usually had a very quick and deep perception, but when he did not accept an argument he could be very cutting in his comment and make it ...”

“... he was capable of asking himself, in the course of absorbing evocations of his ‘witch-doctor’ alter ego, in Ian Hamilton’s designation. Auden and Connolly are targets for the hardest knocks in the book. The stories come in various sizes. Virginia Woolf called Isaiah Berlin a ‘violent Jew’ (I throw in a further story here, to the effect that at his ...”

“... was his speciality to prise photographs from their original contexts, to discard or alter their captions, to recrop their borders in the enforcement of unitary meaning, to reprint them for dramatic impact, to redistribute them in new narrative chains consistent with a predetermined thesis.’ In a recent television history of Magnum, the ...”

“... mad doctor, and finds comfort and a new sexual identity in the arms of Veronica, a fellow student. Robert meanwhile, another student, falls in love with Sarah, and would do anything for her, and eventually does. The plotting of this novel is so intricate, so dependent on surprise and on characters showing up in altered circumstances, that I can’t tell much ...”