“... Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock is from the British Museum’s own holdings. One of the four Edward Hopper etchings is Evening Wind. A naked girl kneeling on a bed looks out through an open window. Curtains billow inwards. Her head, turned from you, is hidden by long hair which is pushed about by the wind. In East Side Interior another young woman sits ...”

“... In a short story called ‘The Value of Money’ (1964), we are told that the childhood of Edward Gellert ‘was separated sharply from his adolescence by his mother’s death, which occurred when he was ten.’ In Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf (1945), the teenager Lymie Peters has already lost his mother. The narrator of So Long, See You Tomorrow ...”

“... is certainly that of a well-educated and psychologically stable man. And Trollope’s own brother, Thomas, declared that the Autobiography account of their childhood years was too much en noir. But Super sometimes seems to tilt inconvenient evidence his way. One of the clinching confirmations of Anthony’s account of his wretched schooldays came from Sir ...”

“... celestial clockwork. That was in the 17th century. Now medicine has become, in the words of Lewis Thomas, the youngest science; and the kind of wanton incompetence that did for Josef Shklovsky has passed into history, at least in the West. Or has it? In 1983, the Journal of the American Medical Society published the results of a study on 100 deaths, all shown ...”

“... and things we miss every twenty minutes: ashtrays (deadly but vivid). ‘In extinction,’ Thomas McQuillan writes about Concorde, ‘it’s not the objects that fail. It’s the world that supported them that has gone.’ That is certainly true about supersonic flight. I suppose some people in the UK would still like to get to New York in three ...”

“... Two conflicting versions​ of Thomas More continue to have particular resonance. One is the principled, compassionate statesman who lays down his life for his convictions in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. The other, more or less diametrically opposed, is the zealot and vindictive persecutor of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, who takes savage delight in flogging heretics ...”

“... This experiment, which seems so brutal, and is unethical by modern standards, is the equivalent of Edward Jenner’s first trials of vaccination. In May 1796, he took material from a pustule on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairymaid who had cowpox, and placed that fluid on incisions made in the arm of James Phipps. A later attempt to inoculate Phipps with ...”

“... just had them fired on by soldiers after a reading of the Riot Act. The governor of the island, Edward Eyre, on the advice of his military commander and his law officers, decreed martial law in the county where Morant Bay lay, but excluded the town of Kingston. Although the uprising was put down within a week, in the month that passed before the decree ...”

“... to make anachronistic judgments and ask anachronistic questions is hard to avoid. Why didn’t Thomas Mann come out? Why didn’t Forster publish Maurice in 1914, when he wrote it? Why didn’t the American critic F.O. Matthiessen write a history of gay American writing? How come Lionel Trilling didn’t realise that Forster was gay? And why are gay lives ...”

“... a final jump – through the paper hoop of Norman Mailer’s ‘faction’ – into the company of Thomas Pynchon and Thomas Berger. One of his propositions is that ‘as far as the intellectuals are concerned, the prophecy that a literature of the West would emerge to liberate America from European and ...”

“... prose. For learned disputes had gentlemanly antecedents, and so had learned fabrications; even Thomas Warton was guilty, and he was the author of the standard History of English Poetry, a work some Shakespeare hunters saw as a model for their much desired history of English drama. The deceits practised by the 19th-century forgers were more ...”

“... and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923) had two virtues and one substantial demerit. The virtues were a carefully written introduction by Joseph Conrad, which treated Crane as a major writer, and Beer’s lively and vigorous ...”

“... aristocratic houses, but was now adapted by the chattering classes as a room for secluded leisure. Thomas Mower’s parlour contained a set of bells that were played with a mallet, while that of Matthew Phelips, a former mayor of London, was bedecked with cushions (eight with griffons, seven with lions), painted hangings, benches, a turned chair and an ...”

“... the golden dolly league in Regency London was the Coutts squad: the widow and three daughters of Thomas Coutts the banker. All were flush with cash from his gigantic fortune (probably well over a million) and all married aristocrats. The widow, 45 at her husband’s death, was perhaps no longer a dolly; but no dolly came more golden. She’d inherited most ...”

“... the Interregnum in 1660, Pericles was the first Shakespeare play to be performed, with a youthful Thomas Betterton, aged 25, celebrated in the title role at the Phoenix in Drury Lane. In fact Pericles was more than simply popular: the play became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor ...”