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“... much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 years after it was put up, the Russian Ministry of Culture ...”

“... role in that most celebrated of literary love affairs, between Elizabeth and her fellow poet Robert Browning. Famously eloping in 1846 to escape her tyrannical father, they honeymooned in Pisa, and it was here one morning that Elizabeth shyly slipped a sheaf of papers into her new husband’s pocket. She hurried back to her private study, leaving ...”

“... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the ...”

“... encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet James Merrill and the British novelists Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, she fled town as soon as she could, muttering that she wasn’t made for this kind of thing. She seems to have cut a formidable figure. ‘Mary Renault arrived all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple ...”

“... reflected the broad spectrum of opinion that saw the flag as a sacred symbol of American freedoms. Robert Justin Goldstein’s Burning the Flag thoughtfully draws on the disciplines of law, political science and history to analyse the controversy in all its dimensions. The author is on the side of the civil libertarians, and his book concludes with the Supreme ...”

“... examples of this self-serving tendency, while supplying plenty from the 18th century. Sir Robert Walpole, effective prime minister from 1722 to 1742, was both joyously corrupt and a ruthless exponent of one-party government, yet he seems genuinely to have believed that all expressions of hostility to his protracted regime stemmed not from a sense of ...”

“... summer, we have the heat index, first proposed in 1979 by the Australian environmental scientist Robert Steadman in an article in the Journal of Applied Meteorology entitled ‘The Assessment of Sultriness Part I: A Temperature-Humidity Index Based on Human Physiology and Clothing Science’. Steadman’s index depends on two variables – temperature and ...”

“... had lately crossed the Lodi bridge and taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of valour and genius Italy had witnessed in a few months wakened a slumbering nation ... Soon new and impassioned standards of behaviour were observed ... risking one’s life became fashionable; happiness depended, after ...”

“... of the system Tycho first published in 1588. The volume had been deposited in the Vatican by Pope Alexander VIII, who had inherited it from the apostate Queen Christina, who had found it in the Royal Library in Stockholm, where it had been brought as booty from Prague during the Thirty Years’ War. ‘In a state of euphoria’, Gingerich revealed the Vatican ...”

“... respectability or aristocratic imprimatur. When the author of Vestiges was finally revealed to be Robert Chambers, Scottish encyclopedist and prolific publisher of improving works, the exposure curiously diminished the book’s effectiveness, because it could be regarded from that point on as no more than a ‘popular’ book. Its marginalisation had ...”

“... record of his baptism at St Marylebone in London. In May 1792 he was sponsored for a cadetship by Robert Thornton MP, an East India Company director. A note signed by Sir Hector corrected the error in the baptismal record. Young Hector was a ‘cadet for Madras’ and sailed on the Earl Talbot a month later, arriving at Calcutta on 8 November. His expected ...”

“... Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance, a study of the diplomat and thinker Alexander Sturdza – father a Romanian boyar, mother a Phanariot Greek – in the era of the European Restoration.2Secretary in his twenties to Ioannis Capodistrias, Alexander I’s Greek envoy to the Congress of Vienna, with ...”

“... Robert Wistrich’s book is about the Jews of Vienna in their golden age, Steven Beller’s about the city’s culture in its golden age. You could be forgiven for thinking that these amounted to the same thing. Not all Viennese Jews were cultural heroes, and not all Viennese cultural heroes were Jews. But the overlap is impressive and in need of explanation ...”

“... that were not present in the Sicilian campaign which was planned by Montgomery and overseen by Alexander. Eisenhower was chosen to be the Supreme Commander of the Normandy landings, not because he had proved himself to be a brilliant soldier, but because the balance of forces made it inevitable that the top military post should be held by an ...”

“... around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and another poet of weirdness, New England weirdness, Robert Lowell, knew also about cars: ‘A savage servility slides by on grease.’ There are antique shops in Stockbridge, where antique seems to mean the day before yesterday. And grand white wooden houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be ...”