“... too, in Jacques le Fataliste, has no inhibitions about buttonholing his reader and threatening to alter the story if there are too many interruptions. It would perhaps be more accurate to describe this kind of fiction as Brechtian, in the sense that the author goes out of his way to emphasise that he is not some kind of tape-recorder but a man with a pan to ...”

“... therefore seems to be the original colour of [human] Nature, which climate, food and customs alter and change into yellow, brown or black.’ The ‘most handsome and best built men’ among the whites were to be found in the most temperate part of Europe, between the fortieth and fiftieth degrees of latitude. By a happy coincidence, Perpignan sits on ...”

“... averages that linked weather to climate could be calculated. Some scientists, such as Harvard’s Robert DeCourcy Ward, who in 1910 became the first professor of climatology in the US, disdained all proxies, insisting that instrumental measurements were the only reliable indices for the modelling of climates past and present. But some believed they had ...”

“... has exposed the militarisation of a wing of the American Right, and could perhaps permanently alter the locus of the national debate. It has also made 19 April into a date of cultish significance. It was on 19 April 1992 that a supremacist guerrilla named Randy Weaver saw his wife and child shot dead during a shootout with Federal agents in Idaho. On 19 ...”

“... that America specialises in conferring now and then on a writer. The novels featuring Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman (a decidedly unsweet fellow despite his name), make mordant and painful comedy out of the experience of literary fame. Zuckerman’s scandalous novel Carnovsky, which like its model Portnoy’s Complaint has broken the literary ...”

“... voluptuous rebirth.’ There aren’t many skeletons left in Hardwick’s closet. Since 1973, when Robert Lowell published The Dolphin, a series of sonnets based on Hardwick’s letters to him during the breakdown of their marriage, the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first ...”

“... disruption (c.1996) or epigenetics (c.2008), both of which elucidate how toxic chemicals can alter DNA activity even in the absence of mutations or other genetic injury. When she was drafting her chapters, it was not yet accepted toxicological wisdom that the timing of exposure matters, with exposures during pregnancy, infancy and early childhood ...”

“... two women to be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed, Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers’; they were looking for her father, who was often on ...”

“... MI5. Funds for upkeep and staff salaries were provided by Samuel Courtauld, who, with Lee and Sir Robert Witt, had recently founded the Courtauld Institute of Art. By 1935 it was clear that there was no realistic chance of a return to Hamburg in the foreseeable future. At this point Felix Warburg in New York began to press for the removal of the institute to ...”

“... 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ...”

“... These verses stand at the head of the first chapter of Possession, fathered on Byatt’s alter ego in the novel as an excerpt from his supposed poem dated 1860, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. David West in the Times Saturday Review for 24 August 1991, show-casing the piece in a panel headed ‘Reading a Poem’, invited us to see here ‘many of the ...”

“... John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the novel was published, Longman’s Magazine published ‘The Persons of the Tale’, in which Captain Smollett and Long John Silver step out of the narrative after the 32nd chapter to have a chat ‘in an open place not far from the story ...”

“... in Hollywood, but none of his scripts was ever produced. He worked as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy, a career cut short by JFK’s assassination. Recently, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael ...”

“... notorious non-existent plot; in the novel he assigns a similar humiliation to the scientist and alter ego Viktor Shtrum. In doing so he antedated the anti-semitic campaigns of Stalin’s last years and brought them forward into the period of the war. This transposition hints that it may have been his encounters with anti-semitism that galvanised Grossman ...”

“... It offered the vacant throne to William and Mary. What if James returned? Isaac Newton consulted Robert Sawyer, the distinguished lawyer who, with him, represented Cambridge University in the Convention, and received the reassuring advice that to oppose a de facto king, even if on behalf of a lawful king, was treason. But James’s attempt to regain his ...”