“... as having given birth to Social Darwinism. Progress, however, has now found a new champion in Robert Wright. Wright, then on the staff of the New Republic, first entered the fray in 1990, with a lengthy (and unfavourable) review of Gould’s anti-progress manifesto, Wonderful Life. Then, deciding perhaps to make a career out of disagreeing with Gould, he ...”

“... that is excessive and much that is reasonable in the early novels of the young American writer J. Robert Lennon. At 34, Lennon, already the author of four novels, plots his books with a rigour and restraint uncharacteristic of writers of his generation. Whereas his immediate contemporaries Dave Eggers, Colson Whitehead and Mark Danielewski all thrive on ...”

“... alone in their London flat without any money. (She was trying to get away from her third husband, Robert Lowell, who was mad at the time.) It is taken as inevitable that patterns are inevitably repeated. Blackwood becomes a lifelong drunk given to hysterical and unsuccessful relationships, and it is no surprise that Natalya dies of a heroin overdose at the ...”

“... reported that passing aircraft could interfere with radio reception. Less than a year later, Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated by a simple experiment in a field outside Daventry that aircraft could be detected by radio. Radar was born. Remarkably, it was only two years after this that Lindemann demonstrated to Churchill that tinfoil strips cut to a certain ...”

“... commentators have focused on Thatcher and Scargill when writing about Britain’s late coal age; Robert Gildea’s Backbone of the Nation is more interested in the experience of the miners: working underground; feeding and clothing a household; and, most of all, organising the dispute and surviving a year without a salary while often encountering violence at ...”

“... pamphlets: in 1520 the Oxford bookseller John Dorne had A Little Gest of Robin Hood for tuppence, Robert the Devil for thruppence. Orme makes the suggestion that cheap ‘jest-books’, short collections of riddles and stories, can be seen as forerunners of children’s comics.Around the age of seven, a privileged few boys would move on to grammar ...”

“... Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) is the apotheosis of the idea (later picked up by Robert Graves) that the Odyssey is too charming to have been written by a man, and that, moreover, no man would make a heroic journey out of a return to a middle-aged wife. But women are not incidental to the Iliad. Helen’s abduction has caused the war, and the ...”

“... the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol sightings, as ...”

“... to the force. This is known as Hooke’s law, after the 17th-century British physicist Robert Hooke, who said it in Latin: ‘Ut tensio, sic vis.’ Take the weight off, and the spring will bounce back to its original coiled state. But there comes a point at which the load is too heavy. The spring will suddenly collapse, and won’t return to its ...”

“... The first stop is a scandal in Swinging London. In February 1967 police arrested Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser (a prominent art dealer) for drug possession. Based on a press photograph of Jagger and Fraser in a police van, Swingeing London 67 (1968-69) is blurred, its colours lurid. The two celebrities, who otherwise thrive on our gaze, here attempt to ...”

“... protest or comment. One of the most famous, the Gothic Temple at Stowe, was built as a critique of Robert Walpole’s regime. While the exhibition makes reference to these buildings, it writes them off as ‘fakes’. In fact their polemical potential was long-lived and in the last century the greatest exponent of the rhetorical ruin was Ian Hamilton ...”

“... in the American non-objective field’. Yet Diebenkorn, who expressed a deep admiration for Robert Motherwell and de Kooning, was clearly cautious about going the whole hog. Disintegrating Pig takes us through the motions of abstract painting but it’s more a rehearsal of abstraction than the thing itself and it’s difficult not to see the ...”

“... affiliated with the Centre for American Progress, who has called for military intervention to oust Robert Mugabe. It’s not just Americans: Michael Ignatieff ardently supported the invasion of Iraq in the name of humanitarian values. The inescapable Bernard-Henri Lévy was at the fore in demanding Nato go to war against Gaddafi. (Lévy has ‘moved on’ to ...”

“... verse, and, according to a website about Afghan hounds, once owned the cave in which Robert the Bruce hid out. I’d just confirmed that A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo was packed with neo-Jacobites when my acquaintance popped up online with further information about the annual Mass. ‘I should add, it’s this Wednesday,’ he ...”

“... the probation service, at a cost of about half a billion pounds. Raab’s immediate predecessor, Robert Buckland, sacked in the reshuffle of 15 September, was one of the last cabinet ministers who voted Remain in the EU referendum, so did well to survive as long as he did. He was a proper criminal barrister, practising for almost twenty years before becoming ...”