“... a ‘folio Beaumont and Fletcher’ – an acquisition that he had saved up for by wearing his brown suit until it was threadbare. Both scared and enraptured, Elia had dithered until 10 p.m. on a Saturday before finally setting out to walk from Islington to the bookseller’s premises in Covent Garden. When he returned home, he insisted on collating and ...”

“... watching the equestrian activities of Princess Anne. This last source is tapped by Professor R.A. Brown in a provocative paper on the social status of the Norman knight, calling for sympathy with the ‘sheer love of war’ which can be found in the governing classes of the Middle Ages. To exercise this sympathy is not necessarily to be pro-war but it is a ...”

“... challenger, leave their mark. So do party differences, and not just in matters of policy. Allison Brown, a student of mine at Smith College, discovered that Republican and Democratic acceptance speeches of the Sixties and Seventies took different approaches to ‘sovereignty’. Republicans stressed the ultimate authority of God, which they implicitly ...”

“... and park of circa 1700 in which we overhear a scene from Pamela, and then becomes a painting by Richard Wilson with figures from Peregrine Pickle. Thereafter we are led through Gainsborough’s Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and ...”

“... novel. It has more whimsy than Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and more moments of hope than Richard Wright’s Native Son. It is too ambivalent to work as a polemic, and seems instead destined to join the collective prison-based entertainment pile: television shows and movies that, as Davis once wrote, serve as much to normalise the abnormal prison ...”

“... and intellectual pre-eminence. By the end of the 19th century the physiologist Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard was injecting himself with extracts of dog and guinea-pig testicles to restore his youth. (It failed.) In popular culture the scientist’s elixir was transformed into ‘monkey glands’, which had a long, if much satirised, vogue, still extant in ...”

“... supported by the money his brother made. His even greater good fortune was to have an uncle, Richard Lloyd, who believed in him and backed him, convinced that he was a prodigy – an opinion Lloyd George shared. From the earliest days, there were scandals relating to affairs and paternity suits to be hushed up; the list of his conquests would include ...”

“... not that far) from Dalí’s charades of transgression, one man shits, one man slumps in a shit-brown blanket, one man wipes his backside. Which way does authenticity lie? Which way art?’ Authenticity now lies, it would seem, with purely mechanical records like CCTV clips. But the gallery’s Midas touch can turn those too into art, and in the process ...”

“... ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters. Not to mention the lush costuming: party dresses, skinny brown ties, angora cardigans, vivid blue suits and ruffled peignoirs, captured in the pure dark hues and wide lighting ranges that Technicolor never committed to film. Sooner or later, though, unless you watch the whole series with the sound off, you will have to ...”

“... in the action of combing its hair, which flowed around its shoulders’, and was ‘of a light brown colour’. ‘The head was shaded on the crown, the forehead round, the face plump, the cheeks ruddy, the eyes blue, the mouth and lips of a natural form, resembling those of a man.’ ‘The breasts and abdomen, the arms and fingers were of the size of a ...”

“... doctors who met her published the most intimate gynaecological accounts of their discoveries. Sir Richard Manningham reported that he haddiligently search’d the whole Vagina, and being well assured that that time all was clear from Imposture, I touched the Os Uteri, which was close and contracted in such manner that it would not receive so much as the point ...”

“... alone), hastening its acquisition by HarperCollins. Eve’s irritating editor, Amanda Farley-Brown, is crossing her fingers that Richard and Judy will feature a Genuine. But Eve is blocked, unable to begin work on the next book, and has decamped to a holiday house in Norfolk for a change of scene and to get away from ...”

“... to the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade. ‘Fatima’s Poem’ is addressed to Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), and was inspired by a visit to Penrhyn Castle, one of eleven National Trust houses involved in the project. Pennant’s family owned four sugar plantations in Jamaica and he used some of the profits to develop the ...”

“... the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But Gordon Brown’s firm refusal to abandon sterling, made from his position of strength at the Exchequer, maintained the status quo bequeathed by Major. London would sign up to the Social Chapter that Major had sidestepped, but despite increasingly frantic pressure from ...”

“... then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one ...”