“... human blood ‘taken from a clean, happy and temperate adolescent’, or the milk of a healthy young woman of ‘tempered complexion’. This last food was advertised as a favourite of the elderly John Caius of Cambridge, who offered vivid proof that you are who you eat: Caius was made ‘so peevish and so full of frets when he suckt one woman froward of ...”

“... in Hollywood in 1972. Fifteen famous directors are there, including John Ford, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Mulligan, George Stevens, Robert Wise, William Wyler, Billy Wilder. Hitchcock sits next to Buñuel, says very little, then at one point puts an arm round his companion’s shoulder and says with deep ...”

“... The British Ambassador in Constantinople reported that Jews were behind the revolution of the Young Turks of 1908, a complete nonsense. ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine ...”

“... I he is punished by being cast as a legless lecher who hangs around Montmartre trying to seduce young girls as well as Céline’s wife. The second volume appears to have a narrower focus. Its working title was ‘Bombardement Montmartre’, and it revolves around a single event, the bombing of the Porte de la Chapelle metro station on 21-22 April ...”

“... of being a poseur and playboy who neglected his work. It was only in 1895, when Burroughs died young (he and Wellcome hadn’t spoken in five years), that Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to ...”

“... In 1802​ , the young Humphry Davy introduced his first full course of chemistry lectures at the Royal Institution by addressing the fear that science was a Trojan horse for social or political reform. In ‘a bright day, of which we already behold the dawn,’ he announced, ‘we may look forward with confidence to a state of society in which the different orders and classes of men will contribute more effectively to the support of each other than they have hitherto done ...”

“... often unpredictable, as many traders discovered to their cost. When the American captain Gideon Young shipped two tonnes of the medicinal sea plants known as ‘squills’ to Brown & Ives in Rhode Island, the merchants could not sell them. Having paid the burdensome tariff levied on all such imports, Brown & Ives re-exported the plants that hadn’t already ...”

“... neoclassical architecture and limited palette give the scene an uncharacteristic austerity – the young guides’ mustard-yellow stockings are the only spots of colour – but the woman’s dress is too elaborate for museum-going and a cigar on the steps pointed in her direction signals a male presence beyond the frame. Ignoring her husband, she makes eyes at ...”

“... second book, another novella, The Book of Words (2007), is the monologue of a disturbed young woman who jumps between childhood memories and adult retrospection. Her account of a bourgeois upbringing in an unnamed hot country, where her blue-eyed parents teach her traditional German songs, is interrupted by grotesque, apparently hallucinated ...”

“... which until then had had a near romantic intensity. In 1996, Tversky died, suddenly and young, of malignant melanoma; the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to Kahneman for both men’s research.Today Kahneman is better known than Tversky. But neither would have become famous without the other. Before the 1970s, Kahneman worked largely on ...”

“... have, however, was Patrick Vieira. Before Wenger arrived at Arsenal, he told the club to buy this young, unknown central midfielder from AC Milan. Arsenal were down 1-0 at home to Sheffield Wednesday on 16 September 1996 when, in the 28th minute, Vieira came on for his debut, replacing the injured Ray Parlour. Arsenal went on to win 4-1. According to Dennis ...”

“... too far: as he rounds up her livestock in payment of a claim, she grabs his cloak and her two young sons, nobodies with no money or power, wound him mortally. Everywhere else in Europe they would all have swung on a gibbet. In Iceland they got off with losing their farm; but Einarr didn’t get it (they’d lost it already) – the gothar in general must ...”

“... he returns to London and discovers that Mr Harcombe, last seen living with Gloria Patterson, a young woman compounded equally of beauty, vulgarity and spite, has fallen on hard times. He has lost his healing gifts, is living alone in a Notting Hill basement, and working as an astrologer. Timothy goes to work once more as his father’s assistant, and soon ...”

“... de Man toady’, but how reassuring to hear that they were really ignorant sycophants. If a young woman with degrees from Yale and Oxford has written a feminist critique of the beauty industry which becomes a best-seller, and she’s pretty to boot, how comforting to hear that she’s ‘a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass’. If a ...”

“... Parini observes that ‘Like so many gifted writers – F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden and Robert Frost among the most prominent of them – Steinbeck could not accommodate himself to the academic grid and grind.’ Were Parini to describe Steinbeck pissing, doubtless we should be told that Shakespeare and Milton were also in the habit of passing water ...”