“... Wootton sees as very similar to the 19th-century germ concept. Of all people, why didn’t William Harvey – who knew of this text – see the point? That’s simple too: Harvey ‘had radically misunderstood Nardi’s argument because of a fundamental ambiguity in Latin’ – the English for the Latin semen could be either ‘semen’ or ...”

“... in his right hit him. She then saw Peach sit down, and a police constable, later identified as James Scottow, go over to him. Peach was leaning against a wall and Scottow, who said he thought Peach was hiding from the police charge, shouted at him to move on. (A police internal investigation found that, given the ‘confusion and general ...”

“... turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI, James Comey, who in July had refused to indict Mrs Clinton, but criticised her use of an insecure email server while she was secretary of state. A few days before the election, Comey gave notice of another possible violation only to clear her again. A more ...”

“... incompatibles that gave The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) its impact, even for readers who found William Beckwith, the studly toff who narrates it, a fantasy projection rather than a plausible human portrait. Baker came up with his own explanation for the reason such an alien artefact, along with Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty and Christopher ...”

“... Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William Phillips, who co-edited Partisan Review with Rahv, described her as ‘one of our most cutting minds’, ‘charming even when most devastating or malicious’. Isaiah Berlin said she was ‘much more bitchy’ than Mary McCarthy, ‘but sharper and more ...”

“... On Hoxton Square, if anyone cares to notice it, is a blue plaque for the local physician, James Parkinson, who identified and described the neurological disease that carries his name. But now, with ever increasing speed, the memory traces of market gardens, madhouses, priories, holy wells, 19th-century radicalism, are being wiped out by the new ...”

“... later, having published An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology in 1932, A Novelette and Other Prose by William Carlos Williams, and two books by Pound: How to Read and The Spirit of Romance. It was while the Oppens were in Europe that the word ‘Objectivist’ came into existence. Pound had foisted Zukofsky on Harriet Monroe as a guest editor of Poetry for an ...”

“... seruants place and dutie’ was acknowledged to be ‘of more abiect and inferiour kinde’, as William Gouge put it in Of Domesticall Duties (1622). By the mid-20th century, the material conditions of service had changed beyond recognition, yet the ideological assumptions that had governed the early modern household continued to colour the language and ...”

“... astonishment, never forgave him for showing such ‘weakness’. Neither did his friends. It took William Taubman almost twenty years to complete his wonderful Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. This Gorbachev biography took a mere 11. And yet it is in some ways an even more heavyweight product. The research is vast; the tracking down of published and ...”

“... triumphant eclecticism’. Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on Jones – ‘whereas ...”

“... and Eliza Emmerson. In March he made his first visit to London, where his portrait was painted by William Hilton. Taylor and his business partner James Hessey gave a dinner for him, at which Clare met and became friends with Henry Cary, whose translation of Dante he draws on in ‘To the Snipe’. A week after returning to ...”

“... refugee. ‘The question of the Arab refugees is a moral issue which rises above diplomacy,’ William Zukerman, the editor of the Jewish Newsletter, wrote in 1950. ‘The land now called Israel belongs to the Arab Refugees no less than to any Israeli. They have lived on that soil and worked on it … for twelve hundred years … The fact that they fled in ...”

“... tactile authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the novelists, however, allusion to ...”

“... about Kurt Cobain in ‘About a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre ...”

“... novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James Baldwin described Native Son as a modern-day Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy’, arguing that Bigger Thomas ‘admits the possibility of his being subhuman’ and that Wright was no ...”