“... first time. Five years later, at the age of 28, after working as a reporter in Chicago and a PR man in Schenectady, New York, he published his first short story. He then abandoned PR to write fiction on a freelance basis – those were the happy days before television, he reminds us, when a writer could support himself and his family just by writing short ...”

“... ugly comedy out of the dead animals about which Chardin is elegiac (although the grinning ray and snarling cat of his first Salon piece suggest he could have come close to matching the brutal truthfulness about dead meat you get in Goya’s picture of a calf’s head). Morandi simplified and coarsened the surface of pictures so that the story the ...”

“... to become a kind of force field, drawing outsiders into their own peculiar ‘atmosphere’. Ray Costelloe was one such. She had been at Newnham with Elinor Strachey’s daughter and was apparently in love with the family in general and with Pippa in particular. That she married Oliver rather than any of the others was more the result of his ...”

“... escapist crap for the well-heeled middle-class market’. A conventional put-down by a man distancing himself, quite reasonably, from his disadvantaged background as an old Etonian with a family pile in darkest Kent. The real Ackroyd, Peter, it is felt, has also peaked at the right time, in cabbing alongside James into riparian London for this ...”

“... time he was wearing a red hat, the very one referred to in the title of a subsequent work, The Man in the Red Hat. During his final year of life he also made a home video, La Pudeur et l’impudeur, which was screened on television a month after his death. Yet another Aids book, Cytomégalovirus, was published at this time and a posthumous novel, Le ...”

“... and brother-in-law of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the current overall leader of the movement. A big man with a permanent infant-like smile, he crouched cross-legged behind a low table, sifting through documents. A Kalashnikov rested against the wall next to him. He opened a plastic shopping bag, pulled out a thick pile of papers and started throwing them on the ...”

“... told something. In Mark Illis’s exceptionally promising first novel, A Chinese Summer, a young man tipped into crisis by the unexplained departure of his girlfriend tries in his deep depression to make sense of odd things in the world by interpretative procedures which have a slightly paranoid pressure behind them: even on a familiar suburban ...”

“... double are Henry Moore and Sir Ronald Syme. Nothing could be more interesting than to learn such a man’s views on unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Greenham Common women, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the fitness of women for Holy Orders, but Todd had no intention of writing any such book: his resolution was to ‘place on record an account of my own ...”

“... Macfarlane Burnet and Frank Fenner. Macfarland Burnet and Fenner described some remarkable work by Ray Owen, an agricultural geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, who had found that all cattle twins, whether fraternal or identical, had the same blood group. This, Owen suggested, was due to a fact known for years: that cattle twins often shared one ...”

“... seem to me to become more and more windy, verbose and meaningless. Personally, I think him a man of weak character and great vanity, and I do not trust him.’ And how he feels about Murry seems to spill over into his view of Mansfield, who is all the more suspect because Murry slyly promotes her work. Scofield Thayer, in a letter to Eliot, is perhaps ...”

“... in Henry King’s The Gunfighter. Grave moustache succumbing to gravity.) Many myths surround the man, among enthusiasts, cultists and close readers, and this has always been one of them: Raworth is unwell but never incapacitated. The moustache may be a little greyer than the version flourished in early snapshots – the cover of A Serial Biography, the Barry ...”

“... includes a far lower order of men than Chemist, Physicist or Mathematician. You don’t call a man a Mathematician, deserving of his country’s reward, because he has spent his life getting as far as quadratics; but every fool who can make a bad species and worse genera is a “Naturalist”.’ And another biologist, Richard Owen, made light of herbarium ...”

“... and a rejuvenated public sphere, he still felt ‘the curious, hostile glances of fans who see a man elbowing his way towards the stadium as they are pouring out after the last whistle’. Ascherson’s homecoming in 1975 coincided with that of another ‘red Scot’, Tom Nairn, whose own journeys, intellectual and geographical, are now surveyed in ...”

“... by E.S. Goodrich, who was (like M.D. Hill, one of his science masters at Eton) a disciple of Edwin Ray Lankester and a believer in natural selection at a time when other modes of evolution seemed to many equally, if not more, persuasive (saltationism, for example, which held evolutionary changes to be abrupt, or neo-Lamarckism, the idea that an organism’s ...”

“... for present-day feminist historians credit that should really go to pioneering historians such as Ray Strachey, J.A. and O. Banks and Constance Rover, who publicised the link between suffragism and sexuality well before the advent of women’s liberation. And neither Kent nor Walkowitz (much advertised here) breaks new ground in recognising the feminist ...”