“... physicians and scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is ...”

“... woman … In the characterisation of women, the male novelists of those years wrote as though Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, Becky Sharp and Emma Bovary had never been created.She describes Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress in Greene’s The Quiet American – a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in ...”

“... how unfamiliar that room had become.’ Her mother’s house was besieged by news crews; she ‘drew every curtain in the house, and she hasn’t opened them since.’ Knox was claustrophobic, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ‘stuff’ she owned. She filled bin bags with her old toy animals, Pokémon cards and manga.She found relief in the ...”

“... Her first encounter with Ackland, at a tea party, did not go well. But their shared love of poetry drew them together. Warner bought a cottage for her own occasional use, and installed Ackland as steward. They moved in on 23 September 1930 and became lovers soon afterwards. The exchange of letters about Faithfull’s theory of psychological bisexuality was ...”

“... living on my nerves. I would wish the next days out of my life.’ The novel tells the story of Elizabeth Reegan, the second wife of a sergeant, who is slowly dying of cancer in a police barracks in the Irish midlands. It would not have been lost on McGahern’s father that the disease that killed John McGahern’s mother had been given to his ...”

“... Scott’s Woodstock. And this raises the possibility – very unlikely, I think – that Pound drew directly on Scott without needing Browning as intermediary. However, Pound was a very bookish poet, as Browning was also. In Browning’s case, the proclivity was inherited: for Browning’s father was a perhaps compulsive bibliophile. (And if this seems out ...”

“... an evaluation of its chances involves understanding the problems and aims of Cardinal Fleury and Elizabeth Farnese. Even though the exploration of English Jacobitism in this book is superficial, the European dimension makes it a great deal more than the exploration of an anachronistic quirk of Scottish history. It is natural that this book, while ostensibly ...”

“... or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe. The universal survey would become one of ...”

“... their calls for reform when they needed to sweeten their Presbyterian allies in Scotland, but drew back when moderate English opinion had to be conciliated. The ‘piety’ of ‘Warwick’s godly mafia’, an organisation which in one of Adamson’s eirenic moments is allowed to have been ‘first and foremost the outward expression’ of an ‘inward ...”

“... Futurist serate were particularly good news for fruit and vegetable vendors: the events drew audiences of three or four thousand, many of whom came armed with tomatoes, potatoes, oranges and eggs with which to pelt the merry pranksters. Marinetti evolved a Futurist style of declamation which seems to have been highly effective: the Futurist ...”

“... chronicles, both contemporary and written long afterwards. It is unclear how much the chroniclers drew on anything more than rumour and hearsay. Each had his own agenda. With the Capetians, there are few examples of triumphalist court-sponsored narratives such as those promoted by the early Carolingian rulers. Instead, the chroniclers offered idiosyncratic ...”

“... And the plays brought in a lot of money. ‘I had achieved what I wanted . . . Bernard Partridge drew a cartoon for Punch in which William Shakespeare was shown biting his fingers in front of the boards that advertised my plays.’ As a wit-about-town, Maugham had various dalliances with women. His lust for chaps was a fairly open secret in his circle – he ...”

“... to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah (Cajah), Leonora Elizabeth (Betsey), Emma and baby John. Here, in the summer of 1820, William Hazlitt entered their lives, and here Sarah steps into the limelight of the Liber Amoris. That book remains the primary source for what happened between them – how could it be ...”

“... they’re busy too.’ In those days, doctors-in-training and students, rather than phlebotomists, drew blood at night, with varying success (this at one of the best resourced hospitals in the world, and one of the oldest in the US). The resident stuck a needle in the crook of my arm and popped a glass tube into the plastic sleeve on the bevelled surface of ...”