“... by two refugee physicists in Birmingham, the German-born Rudolf Peierls and the Austrian-born Otto Robert Frisch, when they found that the critical mass of the fissile uranium isotope 235 needed for an explosion was no more than a few kilograms. In the summer of 1941 Peierls engaged Fuchs to help him with theoretical work on the project. Nine years later Fuchs ...”

“... two long interviews with the man himself, and she told the young editors George Plimpton and Robert Silvers that she would give the interview to the Paris Review, so long as they made her an associate editor. They took the material (Number 12 in their famous series ‘The Art of Fiction’) and Stein got her place on the masthead, but they removed her ...”

“... as an adult. But in the mid-20th century he was the most popular poet in the United States after Robert Frost, and from early in his career, among the most admired by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: ...”

“... out Nixon’s order to fire Cox; Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, followed. Eventually Robert Bork, the solicitor-general and next in the chain of command at Justice, sacked Cox. Ziegler announced the abolition of the special prosecutor’s office. But the public outcry at the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ was so great that Nixon was forced to ...”

“... only much later that I realised my interview had taken place the day after he testified against Robert Oppenheimer. Another thing I didn’t know in 1957 was the very active role that many of the academics I knew had played in creating the bomb. At Harvard, Norman Ramsey had been involved in selecting the plane that delivered the bomb over Japan. He also ...”

“... Armenian assassin of Talat Pasha, one of the chief génocidaires, was acquitted by a Berlin jury. Robert Kempner, a young law student, observed the trial, which was widely reported and which sparked Rafael Lemkin’s obsession with criminalising state-sponsored mass murder. Neither man knew the other. In 1946, Kempner, now on the US prosecution ...”

“... stayed there, but he was determined to distinguish himself. Cranborne was quite the opposite. By May 1915 he had developed ringing noises in one ear which saw him invalided home. While Crookshank and Macmillan, who had both been seriously injured, were being passed ready to return to the front line, Cranborne was passed fit only for ‘light duties’, which ...”

“... I write as I type, or I type as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... goals. He was ‘cynically realistic’, Patterson writes, in his pursuit of ‘real ideals’. He may have been ruthless, but in a corrupt world it was better to trample legislative tradition and get bills through than, as Long said, ‘sit back in my office, all nice and proper, and watch ’em die’. Patterson acknowledges Long’s reputation as a ...”

“... to South Africa? So it’s that bad? My translator’s brother is an apiarist in Plovdiv. He may not be an apiarist much longer, though, because this year all his bees have been born without wings. Without wings? ‘It is a mutation.’ What causes it? ‘We do not know.’ Other apiarists have found the same. Chernobyl? ‘We do not know.’ In Bulgaria ...”

“... least – the General’s grandson. The most remarkable case, though, is that of the press tycoon, Robert Hersant – the third richest man in France. Hersant’s Vichyite and anti-semitic past does not make him an attractive candidate: the last time he stood in a parliamentary election in one of the safest conservative seats in France, he was roundly ...”

“... Little Review, serialised the novel.) Bryher financially supported her lover H.D. and her husband Robert McAlmon, who published Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway. There is also the suggestion, never quite substantiated by Souhami, that the way these women lived, their promiscuity and outsized influence, could itself be considered uniquely ...”

“... driven them into the arms of the deep state, whose prevaricating representatives – in particular Robert Mueller, who before being appointed as special investigator into alleged Trump-Russia collusion was the longest-serving director of the FBI since J. Edgar Hoover – have been transformed by the mainstream media into paragons of integrity. Why these people ...”

“... listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally to the highest office. He was undaunted by the fact that no ...”