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“... 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 ...”

“... and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the ...”

“... Robert Stone​ was the feral child of American literature. He arrived in the world with no one to explain or defend him, except his mother, Gladys. About her we know only stray bits of personal history. The chief evidence that Stone’s father existed is the fact of Stone himself. All other claims – that he was a railroad detective, was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next ...”

“... that is the case. I lay claim to those marshes, The Lagan, the shipyards, The Ormeau Road in winter, he says; and ‘Going in the Rain’ begins: An Adam house among tall trees Whose glaucous shadows make the lawn A still pool; bracken on the screes Wedged above a lichened bawn; A rectory on a broken coast... We are left in no doubt as to where we ...”

“... one.’ What did undeniably touch him was South Africa, where he and his family spent every winter from 1900 to 1908. Kipling’s passion for South Africa became almost as vivid as his passion for India. It was a passion not only for a landscape and a way of life, but for an emergent polity. He referred to the part of the year he spent at the Cape as ...”

“... an effect on the global climate similar to a nuclear strike, plunging the world into long-lasting winter. If something the size of the Chicxulub impactor, perhaps 15 km across, were to arrive, we probably wouldn’t fare any better than our reptilian predecessors.The Vera Rubin Observatory, which is assembling the world’s largest survey telescope on a ...”

“... woes in comfortable England by deploying memories of Mostyska, where the well froze so hard in winter he had to break the ice with an axe and where he had relatives so poor that a tin of sardines was an annual treat.)At some point during the First World War, Berl moved to Berlin, where he married Czarna Laub, also from Krakowiec. They had two ...”

“... curious chord in the reader’s mind, it came to me on such a night ... in the city, when a light winter rain was falling like a mist around the lamps. The echo you hear, of course, is of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.’ A biographer, Holmes has told us, is always kin, too, to those two 18th-century presences, talking and arguing all night in the labyrinth of dark ...”

“... denunciation, makes it clear: the name was criminal enough. Pliny stands as first witness in Robert Wilken’s The Christians as the Romans saw them, a relaxed survey of some familiar texts and their backgrounds. The exposition is clear and open-minded, though not always reliable in detail (‘Thystes’ for Thyestes’, ‘chriophoros’ for ...”

“... to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic. Now Merrill is available to the English in a slim volume of his best work, selected by him shortly before his death in 1995. Merrill was far from ...”

“... Every spring, the Dalai Lama used to move to the Norbulingka, his summer palace, from his gloomy winter quarters in the towering Potala Palace. The procession was a celebrated early summer ride along a rural road. Now the Norbulingka lies in a dreary inner suburb, surrounded by uninspired functional architecture. The road to it is lined with shops and ...”

“... his confession either: after a decade of false starts, it was among the first pieces he published. Robert Morrison observes that another of his trademark habits, riding on the top of carriages rather than inside, became a vogue among the dashing ‘Oxford sparks’ of his day; but opium-eating didn’t apparently hold similar thrills for the dandy ...”

“... of Indians and Britons would be copiously spilled in vicious partisan conflict. Throughout the winter months of 1857 there had been rumours of something afoot in northern India: talk of conspiracies passed by chapati, of secret signals encoded in lotus flowers. Nor was it lost on some (Muslim millenarian preachers among them) that 1857 marked the centenary ...”

“... allowed not to take part in the shooting, and suffered no punishment. The other helpful book is Robert Jay Lifton’s magnificent The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). Lifton interviewed a number of doctors who had worked at Auschwitz, some of them prisoners and others SS medical officers on the camp staff. No research ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”