“... and scattered on the ground; dried rosemary, burned in a chafing dish, was also thought to help ward off the pestilence). William Shakespeare survived and may even have developed immunity to plague, for he subsequently lived through a virulent outbreak in London in 1592-93 that swept away 10,500 people, and another in 1603 that killed 25,000. A string of ...”

“... or even fifteen-minute pick-ups, none likely to have any emotional content. As he had told John Lehmann, “I freely admit to having no romantic notions about trade.”’ ‘Their residence in Paris in spring 1965 made clear to both Howard and Gore how much more they preferred Rome. Nightlife and cruising were easier, more casual there, and there were ...”

“... pure’ and so on. Among her appealing period snapshots are notes on a visit to the poet laureate, John Masefield, ‘an absolute poppet’ whose dining room was so cold that she stopped for a double rum on the way home. And here and there you can see her sharpening her ideas in unlikely places. Her notion of a style ‘which makes its impact a fraction later ...”

“... encounter with the Demoiselles because the painting figures so prominently in the second volume of John Richardson’s magisterial Life of Picasso, whose first chapter, and part of the second, are devoted to its genesis, sources, formal innovations and iconography, and the ways in which Picasso’s experiences at the time he was painting it affected its final ...”

“... that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent of ...”

“... wounded supporters (including Booth in The Poet’s Plight) are still contending against them. John Osborne (director of American Studies at Hull) attempted to refute those denigrating Larkin on ideological grounds in his 2008 Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence; his new book, Radical Larkin, fortified with literary theory, wishes to reclaim Larkin as a ...”

“... of cancer eight months later but in the meantime some of the cells found their way to the lab of John and Margaret Gey of Johns Hopkins University. They were trying to find a method of keeping human cells dividing in a culture outside the body and had turned to cancer cells for their ability to divide essentially unchecked. These particular cells, named HeLa ...”

“... Vi had contracted as a child after being sent to hospital with measles and put in an isolation ward with scarlet fever patients. Why there? ‘Because there were no doctors on duty to examine her. They were all off playing cricket.’ The tragedy was dealt with as most tragedies were dealt with in English middle-class homes at that time: no one talked ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”

“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... is necessary that great numbers should be wretched as well as poor.’ Wages must be kept low to ward off what economic historians termed the ‘leisure preference’ and workers called Saint Monday (it extended, some claimed, to Saint Tuesday). Early modern historians seldom pay homage to Tawney; his preoccupations seem out of step with the contemporary ...”

“... is shattered, even pain stops. I am free.’ Wolf has said of writing that it is ‘an attempt to ward off the cold’: but it is only an attempt, and the cold is never far away from the reader of this cogent and impressive ...”

“... of Wight’. It is possible that Barnes may not have read Williams-Ellis: he may only have read John Gaze’s history of the National Trust, Figures in a Landscape (1988), which discusses Williams-Ellis’s vision, or perhaps Patrick Wright’s A Journey through Ruins (1991), which quotes Gaze quoting Williams-Ellis, or perhaps one of the countless other ...”

“... since my arrival five years before, had served as consulting-room cum laboratory and maternity ward. The fathers were feverishly drawing up blueprints; Edith, my wife, was typing orders. I was ordering equipment; we would have electricity. Nobody had much time to devote to our guest. In the morning Greene would walk through the meadow to the banks of the ...”

“... was indicted for ‘unlawfully receiving the naked private parts of a person in his mouth’; John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a room in a lodging house on Blackfriars Road. ‘The detection of these ...”