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“... search for the North-West Passage, David Livingstone’s fruitless missions to the Zambesi, and Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed mission to the South Pole. All these deaths were indeed flawed: Franklin’s by the large number of people who died looking for him and by the cannibalism to which his desperate companions resorted at the last, Livingstone’s by ...”

“... and the classics get retrospective plastic surgery, so that Jay Gatsby receives the looks first of Robert Redford then Leonardo DiCaprio. Anne Hathaway’s blandly pretty mask is tied with cinematic ribbon over Jane Austen’s blurry features – a criminal defacement however photogenic the impostor. Traffic the other way, taking cinema as the basis for ...”

“... of James’s philosophical practice are caught in this swift picture. I take these quotations from Robert Richardson’s William James, the most recent in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James ...”

“... If so, how and why did they separate? And, finally, have they now been reconciled? Robert Maillart’s Salginatobel Bridge of 1930. The modern distinction, at its simplest, is that architects invent – draw or model the shapes they want materials to take – and engineers calculate how those shapes, when realised, would respond to the ...”

“... by Reeve as corrupt in more than a thousand places. Its joint dedication to King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester, which Faletra regards as ‘savvy marketing’ by Geoffrey, is likewise dismissed as a ‘clumsy adjustment’ of the original one, to Robert and Count Waleran of Meulan. Faletra might well feel sore that ...”

“... of the 1380s and 1390s. The young king and his courtier counsellors – Michael de la Pole, Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Sir Simon Burley were the most prominent – clearly eyed with fear and hostility Gaunt’s vast landed wealth and the influence it gave him. Twice, in 1384 and 1385, members of the court (and in 1385 Richard himself) were ...”

“... Tractatus, itself a notoriously obscure work, are some of the clearest parts of Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom’s collection. It is his expositions of his own ideas which are often so hard to follow. Other things contribute to Sellars’s relative invisibility in the broader intellectual landscape. He was an academic philosopher through and through: his ...”

“... unusual layout and typography, and for his close association with older poets, especially with Robert Lowell (he co-edited Lowell’s posthumous Collected Poems). Bidart and his poems indeed have all these qualities, but they are not the best reasons to read his poetry. That poetry – especially in his last few books – deserves to be known for the ...”

“... beds are sailing into a harbour where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral. The translation is Robert Hass’s, in The Essential Neruda. And here is the end of a poem called ‘Those Lives’, from Isla Negra: Y si algo vi en mi vida fue una tarde en la India, en las márgenes de un río: arder una mujer de carne y hueso y no sé si era el alma o era el ...”

“... Baby rats. Thrashy rats. Ugly, dirty scratchy rats. Funny, jumpy cute rats.’ And then there is Robert Sullivan’s delightful and revolting Rats, the most exhaustive, nauseating and pleasurable compendium of rat facts ever set down. Facts such as: wherever there are human beings, there are rats. China is where the rat originated, and where you can find it ...”

“... The Best Man and, beginning in the late 1960s, an impressive roster of American writers, including Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth and Garry Wills – whose analyses of Nixon, Reagan and Wayne blazed the trail for Nixon at the Movies – took him on as a character. Pundits have searched for ...”

“... the unfortunate Wordsworth, who presided over ‘moderate anarchy’ until the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, came to the rescue of his old school by installing him as a canon of Westminster). But Tyerman suggests that more often than not the governors, staff and boys (or some combination of the three) were glad to see the back of any incumbent Head, even ...”

“... Victoria in 1897. The thumping Unionist electoral triumph of 1895 was confidently ascribed by Sir Robert Ensor (who had been a Winchester schoolboy at the time) to an upsurge of expansionist imperialism, while A.G. Gardiner, the biographer of Sir William Harcourt, spoke of ‘a tidal wave of Jingoism’, as ‘the arrogant nationalism of Mr Kipling and the ...”

“... she just held up a flapping book of cheques or something and waved them at me from her chair. ‘Robert,’ she said, ‘we’re in the money. Today we’re a couple of rich kids you and me.’ ‘Is that a chequebook?’ I asked. ‘These were before chequebooks,’ she said. ‘This is savings stamps from the old Midland Bank machine on Queenstown ...”

“... Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain completes a remarkable biography. No other biographer of Keynes is likely to surpass it, and everyone who has an interest in the intellectual and public life of this country is in Skidelsky’s debt. This third volume starts in 1937, where the second volume left off ...”