“... Things to People’, and immersed himself in the writings of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. He hung modern pictures in his room and published an article in the rebel magazine the Heretick arguing that ‘to call a work of art immoral is like calling an ink pot sympathetic.’ This amorality so scandalised one parent that he threatened to have his ...”

“... Inquiry had appeared, Jenner returned to Gloucestershire. There was little response to it until Henry Cline, another pupil of Hunter’s, repeated Jenner’s experiments and confirmed his result. The first published comment on the Inquiry came from George Pearson, who verified the efficacy of vaccination from his own collaborative work with William ...”

“... and the detective, just as there seems to be none recorded between Holmes’s prototype, Dr Joseph Bell, and his pupils in Edinburgh – or, indeed, between that Ur-Holmes, Voltaire’s Zadig, and the authorities of Babylon in the mystery of the sacred horse of the king and the queen’s respectable dog. Clues, then, if they are to be fair, must fall within ...”

“... Oxbridge in the 1840s was not without its Germanising tendencies, however, while Charles Bell, who was Owen’s predecessor as Hunterian Professor, was both an Edinburgh man and an ardent Paleyan (contributor, in fact, to the Bridgewater Treatises), as was that archetypal new man and adoptive Londoner, hardly a reassuring figure to the landed ...”

“... of keeping one’s hat in place while performing the nine prostrations of the kowtow. John Bell, a Scottish doctor attached to a Russian embassy c.1720, didn’t enjoy the way sheep were cooked, but was fascinated by the acrobats and jugglers. He reckoned that Russia was the only nation with a fair chance of conquering China, though there wouldn’t be ...”

“... assistant, the latest generation of a Somerset gentry family which had served in India since Henry Strachey went out as secretary to Robert Clive. Jane was clever, as patchily educated as most women of her class and generation, but determined to learn and with ‘a vein in her’, as Lytton later recalled, ‘of oddity and ...”

“... been couched either in such pseudo-scientific tracts about the inferiority of certain races as The Bell Curve, or in big alarmist theories like Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. It’s not at all surprising that in his last book Huntington fretted about the destruction by Latino immigration of America’s national identity, which is ...”

“... Instead, I was truthful, and told her it was as if I was living in that terrible movie Regarding Henry, in which Harrison Ford gets shot in the head during a convenience-store hold-up and afterwards becomes a mental child and can no longer make love to his wife. I used to be able to do this; I know I used to be able to do this. I used to be able to make love ...”

“... fling in Cambridge with a lay-clerk’. Here is the topography of the city of night, from the Bell in King’s Cross to Heaven, the electronic barn underneath Charing Cross which is Europe’s biggest gay club. Pickles’s queens appear to be encircled by some enchantment, an erotic delirium that hides the seediness surrounding them. It will be ...”

“... Plath, who for Hawthorn had the problem that being a woman – personified in the heroine of The Bell Jar – ‘she is not granted the luxury of a double life.’ But Madame Bovary has one – indeed, three lives and more. Plath’s problem was certainly connected with this disability but took a different form. Like many fictional heroines, she was trying ...”

“... Yankee cognoscenti fled the parboiled American plains for the amenities of English civil life. Henry James dined out on transatlantic discrepancies until they nearly killed him and to this day there is still a kind of American for whom England is an America. But increasingly, these are the disoriented few. Something that never really was – money springs ...”

“... however, to have produced small results. In 1927, Barnes quarrelled with his latest protégé, Henry Hart, who responded with a bullet-point denunciation of Barnes and all his work. Of the teaching aspect, Hall mocked his employer’s ‘delusion that eighteen boys and girls, selected by whim, listening to a woman recite with no conviction and no charm ...”

“... his daughter’s high-school scholarship in a drawer and who lived his paltry life ‘under a bell-jar – or a thimble – in a very small dark’. The accompanying story concludes with the ironic exchange (about a very unlovely father, with some ugly secrets): ‘Bring him back! ... Better not.’ The dedicatee of Life Stories is Rebecca West. When one ...”

“... and Peace with Wales, Scotland and Ireland’ (Hugh Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a ...”

“... a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their ...”