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“... father agrees. After all, you are a respected figure. Your experiment goes something like this. A young girl, Sarah Nelmes, is a patient of yours and is known to be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). You draw a syringe full of blood from her arm and go back to James Phipps to make two superficial cuts in his skin, which are about ...”

“... chairpersons of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party: Albert Ho Chun-yan, who offered legal aid to Edward Snowden when he was hiding out in Hong Kong in 2013; and Emily Lau Wai-hing, who in 1991 became the first woman to be elected to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. They urged Taiwan not to trust Beijing’s promises, but their real worry was Hong ...”

“... a last free table before queues started. Dinner 8.30 chez Jean-Claude and Annick. Other guest a young poet, Jacques Lèvre, whom Jean-Claude thinks very promising. Showed me four poems of his in a review: the first and last reminded me at once of Follain, who it turned out Jean-Claude had never read. Shy, unassuming and friendly, Lèvre reminded me of one ...”

“... cast light on civilisation by comparing what happens when blood is sold and when it is donated. Edward Bristow’s subject, likewise, is a service which may be either donated or traded – or obtained under duress. His exploration of it takes him into unfamiliar recesses of public and private depravity, and shines a torch into the laundry room of ...”

“... in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide drowned in a car he drove off a bridge. However, when it was revealed that the ...”

“... Stafford’s Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997), which brackets Emma with her successor, wife of Edward ‘the Confessor’. Stafford’s earlier Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (1983) took a broader view, as does Lisa Hilton’s Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (2008). If one were to pick out another powerful ruler too often forgotten, one might ...”

“... gang, headed by a rascally rector, who murdered a Leicestershire magnate and robbed one of Edward I’s trailbaston judges, before going on to commit numerous robberies in Lincolnshire. The gang were brothers, well-connected enough to buy pardons from the Crown, or to atone by serving in the King’s Army, but fatally drawn to highway robbery. The ...”

“... and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at Toynbee Hall as well as at the universities of Paris and Berlin, he knew about strikes and lock-outs, arbitration, penal codes, and indeed all ...”

“... Berwickshire in August 1914, during which someone reads aloud from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then appearing in the Egoist, and war is declared. It describes two successive changings of the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism ...”

“... expect very little from books with titles like The Fortunate Traveller (Derek Walcott), Sun Poem (Edward Kamau Brathwaite), Aegean Islands (Bernard Spencer) and Sun the First (Odysseus Elytis). Walcott confronts this prejudice in his new volume. Dividing his poems into those set in exile in the ‘North’ (the United States and Britain) and those of the ...”

“... in the world of food, in a course designed to appeal to the clever and curious and artily-minded young. So here it is: SPU27, an acronym standing for Science of the Physical Universe 27. Spelled out in English, the name of the course is Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. The person who thinks it’s funny that SPU sounds like ...”

“... Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of all the flippant irreverences of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, which caused George V to erupt with rage. On the ...”

“... idiomatic French and Italian with perfect ease: this is the pen of an undoubtedly quick and clever young woman. She was at this time 25 and had been a widow for a year. She had lost three children, and nearly died of a miscarriage, before that. She had endured the suicides of her half-sister and of Shelley’s first wife. She had published a travel book and a ...”

“... How do we know, for example, that some felt the pain of bereavement more than others? Was Sir Edward Parry the only one of whom it could be said that ‘the First World War effectively destroyed his world,’ or Leonard Woolf the only one qualifying for the remark: ‘The Second World War put paid to his hopes for international sanity’? Some ...”

“... The London Review sent out prose, and poems, from that building every fortnight, and one day a young man came to the door with a bomb strapped to his back. Standing in the square the other day, trying to ignore the statue of Mahatma Gandhi – it’s not hard to ignore, both because of its ugliness and the minatory nature of his peaceableness – I reached ...”