“... local surgeon. At 21 he moved to London to continue his medical studies as anatomical assistant to John Hunter at St George’s Hospital. Although Jenner returned to his Berkeley medical practice in 1773, Hunter had recognised Jenner’s scientific prowess and encouraged him in his research. ‘Why think – why not try the experiment,’ he wrote in ...”

“... John Le Carré called it ‘the Abteilung’, but the real name of the East German foreign intelligence department was the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or Main Intelligence Directorate, and the man who ran it for almost 34 years was Markus Wolf. When the Berlin Wall fell, three years after his retirement in 1986, Wolf was courted by other intelligence services – West German, American, even Israeli – who hoped to exploit his vulnerable position ...”

“... But from the start the estate was isolated by its geography. It was surrounded on all sides by major roads, from which it was protected, in the words of the Smithsons’ assistant Christopher Woodward, by an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’. The perimeter of the estate was marked by a high wall designed to bounce back traffic noise, and to ...”

“... and the 14th Amendment had been ratified by the country as a whole. Reconstruction plays a major role in Stiles’s book, but it is more metaphorical than actual. That there was no Reconstruction in Missouri, which had not left the Union, would seem to limit the relevance of Stiles’s explanation. And that the James Gang’s violence was directed not ...”

“... at the Home Office in the week that France fell in May 1940, at which the home secretary, Sir John Anderson, declared that he found it hard to believe that any BUF member would help the Nazis. Presented with evidence that several had already been caught passing secrets, he still insisted that to imprison Mosley or his supporters would make them ...”

“... over his dying culture is entitled ‘It Would Be Best If I Refrained from Singing’. All the major genres of troubadour lyric are included: the canso or high courtly love song; the narrative romance; the alba or dawn song (‘parting is such sweet sorrow’); the pastorela, in which a knight tries to seduce a shepherdess; the sirventes or protest ...”

“... suddenly among us. Oppen and Rakosi returned after their long silences; Zukofsky was published by major presses; Bunting produced his masterpiece, Briggflatts; in Wisconsin, the reclusive Lorine Niedecker was writing her best work. And Reznikoff was with them. There were readings, interviews, a prize or two. In 1974, the Black Sparrow Press began a programme ...”

“... tmeses and promiscuously embracing parentheses’ resemble the texts he read as a Greek major at Harvard. The first passage here is by Sappho; the second by Cummings: [        ] Her[ Man[ And see[ms These girls al[l Topmost [ Wanders [ [            ] these [ [                ] Partner [ Own cousin [ Elbows ...”

“... sur l’origine et la nature du beau in an article on the Hollywood comedy directors John Hughes and Judd Apatow, while Cyril Béghin compares a shot in Avatar to Tintoretto’s The Finding of the Body of St Mark. The most famous of Cahiers’ early statements – and the one that most directly affected film history – was Truffaut’s 1954 ...”

“... of The Last English Poachers, written by Bob, his son Brian (also a poacher) and a ghost called John McDonald, is more punk than its predecessors’. The Robin Hood aspect is to the fore. The Toveys see themselves as the rural frontline in the class war, and their book is full of contempt for rural toffs, or ‘ya-yas’, also called ‘saddle-bumpers’ by ...”

“... in the wetness and reach safety in the cafeteria at the summit. But a 34-year-old man called John Mattinson who left the same café half an hour later was struck by lightning and died. When she read about it in the newspaper, Meades’s mother said: ‘Well, if you will stand on a cairn in a thunderstorm …’ True to his interest in ...”

“... to get over nine hundred pages out of them. (For his mere 336 pages Best casts much wider.) John Morley and William Harcourt, whom Jenkins toyed with doing before deciding on the big ‘un, would have required far more research. There is also clearly a market for Churchilliana, not only in Britain but in the US (for which Jenkins’s glossary of British ...”

“... of life.’ Barker’s precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at ...”

“... and annoyed to be asked to write the official biography. It was largely due to his brother John, the art historian who became director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, that Pope-Hennessy was persuaded to take the commission. Royalty, John argued, was ‘an endangered species’ and this was an opportunity to examine ...”

“... Hitchin’, was qualified. ‘Heaven: Evenings and Weekends Only’ was closer to the truth. The major employer, the Spirella corset factory, could provide work for only a fraction of the intrepid experimentalists of the new life. A total rupture was a chimera. Places are fluid and ambiguous. They keep on changing. They are forced into fresh roles. Their ...”