“... of votes gerrymandered and signatures forged on petitions, and even an assassination attempt on Robert Peel, the prime minister. The young and impressionable Engels, whose daily walk to work took him past the Manchester offices of the Cobden brothers’ calico empire, was impressed. For the rest of his life, Engels was convinced that Cobden was the ...”

“... one guest asked not to be put up in ‘your best chintz bed, as I am in the secret, and know Sir Robert died in it.’ Good sleep was the key to good health. Following Aristotelian medical theory, it was believed in the 16th century that sleep was closely linked to digestion: during slumber the stomach heated up, causing the ‘concoction’ of the food ...”

“... Caroline Blackwood’s first novel, was published when she was 44 and married to Robert Lowell. The seven years they spent together transformed her from an occasional magazine writer to a committed littérateur, a vindication of many years in the role of aristocratic playgirl, trophy wife and muse. She hailed from ‘the insular world of the ...”

“... first as mercenaries, for pay, and then as rebels, for land: Hervé (full name not known), Robert Crispin (or ‘Curly’) and Roussel (‘Ginger’) de Bailleul. Roussel – the hero of Duggan’s Lady for Ransom – took part in the Byzantine campaign of 1071 against the invading Turks, which ended in disastrous defeat at Manzikert, but got away with ...”

“... is hard to uproot. Beverly Treasure? Chelsea Herbert? Lloriston Grant? Caroline Blackwood and Robert Lowell have a conversation about Ford Madox Ford? (Well, all right, but what’s it doing among ‘Traveller’s Tales’?)Chelsea Herbert is real too, and writes the best piece in the ‘Children in the City’ section: a funny, simple, and probably ...”

“... key figure in the videogame franchise The Elder Scrolls – will, the hope is, do pretty much what Robert Downey Jr’s carapace did in Iron Man: turn a man into an indomitable soldier, his every biometrical signal translated into deadly action. Weapons are cheap, soldiers are not, and a great deal more money is spent on protection – of our guys – than on ...”

“... to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger. The CIA did not believe either story. According to Robert Baer, a former CIA agent, the Atta story was a ‘blatant fabrication: we had pictures of Atta in Florida’ on the dates when he was meant to be in Prague. The source of the Atta story was the Czech intelligence agency. So where did the Czechs and ...”

“... themselves have not scrupled to use the law to gag speech, as with the indefatigably litigious Robert Maxwell and James Goldsmith. The real argument about free speech lies elsewhere. It’s not just whether you get a platform, but how big yours is compared with other people’s. Free speech means little, though not nothing, if the opportunities for ...”

“... struck between the Labour front bench and the then Viscount Cranborne, now Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, allowed 92 of the 759 ‘hereditaries’ to remain, on the understanding that they wouldn’t thwart the passage of legislation by their confrères. This arrangement, it was agreed, would remain until ‘stage two’ of the reforms. The ...”

“... To this Tebb and Vollum added more than two hundred other cases. The Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s mother, ‘subject to trance seizures’, was already half buried when the sexton filling the grave heard her screaming. Other of Tebb and Vollum’s great ladies were rescued by grave-robbers or (as in the Decameron) kindly necrophiliacs. Some ...”

“... Garry Winogrand, what could be done with ease and subtlety at home was harder to achieve abroad. Robert Frank worked in Britain between 1951 and 1953. Born in Switzerland but based in New York, he was still half-hoping his pictures would appeal to a magazine like Life but at the same time he was trying, as he wrote, to ‘break from the Traditional ...”

“... So Robert Kilroy-Silk, the fallen idol of daytime TV, has failed to win the backing of a majority of the United Kingdom Independence Party’s local chairmen in his bid to replace Roger Knapman as Ukip’s leader. The party’s highest-profile MEP isn’t going to let a ‘farcical’ straw poll stand in his way, however ...”

“... be reviewed in the LRB, is giving the first lecture, and he will be followed by, among others, Robert Crawford, Meg Bateman, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Billy Bragg and Sukhdev Sandhu. You might think the editorial staff of the Sun could learn a thing or two from attending some of the talks, until you have a look at Hold Ye Front Page, or its sequel, Hold Ye ...”

“... Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and the hugely entertaining and wrongly overlooked Robert Pinget. Beckett in particular, and later the very bankable Robbe-Grillet and Simon, seem never to have thought of being published by anyone else, even if it did mean their having to argue the toss over punctuation. There could be no more pleasant way of ...”

“... detailed allusions to this text or that. For a first role model Bayard brings on the librarian in Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities, who has charge of the three and a half million volumes in the imperial library of Kakania. He has never read a single one of them, never gone beyond the titles on the spines and the lists of contents at the front, on the ...”