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“... intricate for mass production but also too impractical to be worth the expenditure. The polymath Robert Hooke summarily dismissed the gadgets when he witnessed them at work in 1673: ‘Saw Sir S. Morland’s Arithmetic engine. Very Silly.’ By the mid-19th century, after improvements in gearing and metalwork, mechanical calculators had become more reliable ...”

“... about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, which contemporaries attributed to the Jesuit Robert Parsons. It implied that the coup had been lawful and urged it on Elizabeth’s subjects as a precedent. Hayward would publish a refutation of the tract after Elizabeth’s death. A Conference shocked not only the Government but most of its critics. Though ...”

“... die ferne Geliebte, whose title – ‘To the Distant Beloved’ – was clearly significant for Robert and Clara during the years of enforced separation that preceded their marriage. Schumann had quoted a phrase from Beethoven’s cycle in the opening movement of the Fantasie. Once he had mastered the art of the Lied, making what many consider the greatest ...”

“... had won the willing patronage of numerous conservative Congressmen and Senators – including Robert Michel, the Republican Minority Leader, Barber Conable (now head of the World Bank) and Jesse Helms. The real high point came, however, when President Nixon, warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White ...”

“... the deepest parts of the self. ‘Do you know what gives me no peace nowadays?’ she wrote to Robert Seidel in 1898: the fact that people, ‘when they are writing, forget for the most part to go deeper inside themselves’. ‘I hereby vow,’ she continued, ‘never to forget when I am writing … to go inside myself.’ She was talking about the ...”

“... moved on, surely reasonably, to 1914-18. Reminiscent in some ways of Paul Fussell’s work, and of Robert Wohl’s The Generation of 1914 in others, this book has a thesis. Like Wolff’s, it works outward from particular occasions to generalisations. One is the first night of Le Sacre du Printemps in May 1913, ‘a milestone in the development of ...”

“... of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the introduction offers a personal reading of the plays which is both interesting and quite unlike the way ...”

“... was a word he often used of modern masterpieces, even referring in a formal speech of eulogy on Robert Frost’s 85th birthday to the ‘terrible realities’ in Frost’s poetry.) The Tertans lose out irrevocably, the Blackburns win irrevocably, and the well-meaning Howe ends up with good career prospects and colluding with the Dean and Blackburn. A later ...”

“... O’Neill’s imagination, he saw himself as a novelist, as the latest of his many biographers, Robert Dowling, points out. After a near fatal suicide attempt in 1912 – the episode is chronicled in the recently discovered short play ‘Exorcism’ – he gave up the romance of death for the romance of art. ‘So here’s looking forward to the new ...”

“... Keeper. Elizabeth was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most influential contemporaries, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Francis Bacon. The Cooke sisters were a byword for intelligence and high education. Their family home at Gidea Hall, near Romford, was described by the Cambridge scholar Walter Haddon as a ‘little university’, and here they learned ...”

“... of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business ...”

“... know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Review crowd, the figure who emerges from Portor’s 1941 text is Austenish, ‘a quiet, tranquil-looking, modest girl’ who sits in a corner listening. Many years, honours, fellowships and prizes later, Paul Binding meets ...”

“... of how the people with power in his new state might wield it. As we now know, they became what Robert Conquest, in his introduction to Djilas’s book, calls the ‘priviligentsia’. The ‘inspectorate’ – the KGB – defended them, instead of policing them. In a double-take at the end of the book, Julian West wakes up in old Boston. The ...”

“... fined for hoarding it. In Hitler’s war, rationing set in early. The crackdown was hastened by Robert Boothby, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, who professed to be shocked by the wanton display of sugared cakes in Princes Street, Edinburgh. It became an offence to put sugar on the exterior of any cake, bun, biscuit, pastry, scone or bread ...”

“... alive and around at the time. I discovered that even this could be fudged in some standard works. Robert Payne is an acknowledged expert on Russian affairs, author of Dostoyevsky: A Human Portrait, The Image of Chekhov, The Three Worlds of Boris Pasternak. The Life and Death of Lenin (1964) runs to 672 pages. I returned to it to check the death toll in the ...”