“... contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’) Or Fermina Daza, in a darkened room in García Márquez’s Love in ...”

“... periodically, from woodworm. The light came from candles, and in December 1755, the keeper, Henry Hall, found the lantern room on fire. No lives were lost that night but Hall himself died twelve days later, after complaining that his insides felt as if they were burning. It was not, as his friends had supposed, some form of post-traumatic shock. While ...”

“... power to communicate feeling). Early in the 19th century, François Magendie in France and Charles Bell in Britain established the sensory/motor division of the spinal roots as fundamental to nervous organisation. Experimenters sliced and snipped, but they also looked to philosophy, their theory of the ‘reflex arc’ being suggested by the Cartesian model of ...”

“... London is equally dark (‘circa Regna tonat’ means ‘it thunders around the throne’): The bell towre showid me suche syght That in my head stekys day and nyght There dyd I lerne out of A grate For all vavore glory or myght That yet circa Regna tonat. By proffe I say the[r] dyd I lerne, Wyt helpythe not deffence to yerne Of innocencie to pled or ...”

“... has he started the Renaissance Theatre Company than he decides to direct and star in a film of Henry V; he combines post-production on Henry V with writing his autobiography. He whizzes from meeting to meeting and deal to deal, occasionally dropping by at the theatre at seven o’clock to knock off a quick performance of ...”

“... spots of nature which grow within a man marked for decline. Artists such as Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, John Piper and Graham Sutherland depart from his text, and while it is tempting to quote the manner of their going it is more illuminating to give a sample of the way in which he addresses himself to the much more difficult task of describing the nature of ...”

“... it, is not ‘a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway’. Max Eastman said Hemingway had false hair on his chest. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, called his courage into question. Of course, there was a lot to debunk – and ...”

“... architecture, and characteristic of such halls are forests of sixty-foot columns sprouting out of bell-shaped bases petalled like inverted lotus blooms and topped by push-me-pull-you pairs of lions, griffins and human-headed beasts. The exhibition has several examples, flanked by more casts from the 1892 expedition, showing endless processions of subjects ...”

“... The first thing​ people noticed about Henry, perhaps the only thing they noticed, was his droopy left eyelid. He was blond, of medium height for the times and pleasant looking, but otherwise unremarkable. Nobody ever claimed that he was clever. Later on, exasperated chroniclers denounced him as ‘simple-minded’, ‘senseless’ and ‘useless’ – simplex, insipiens, inutilis ...”

“... by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is pretty ...”

“... the Pilgrimage of Grace rises in the North, unhappy with reforms in the Church, and is put down. Henry VIII gets a bad leg, courts multiple possible brides, decides there are heretics both to the left and right of him, then marries Anne of Cleves in order to secure an alliance with German princes, and incidentally to protect the supply of alum vital to the ...”

“... it also reconciled him to a few anti-fascist power brokers at home, such as the treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr, for whom Hemingway agreed to ‘look into’ the Chinese during a trip to China with Gellhorn, who was writing a piece for Collier’s in 1941. ‘Hemingway was flattered to be asked,’ Reynolds writes: ‘This was the kind of recognition he ...”

“... were able to develop their own work with an originality that weaker painters, such as Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, were not. As far as art was concerned, Carrington was at the centre; Bloomsbury was the fringe.Her generation – this ‘crisis of brilliance’, as the Slade’s inspiring and famously bad-tempered drawing master, ...”

“... to find evidence for the sort of Shakespeare people wanted produced the forgeries of William-Henry Ireland in the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an ...”

“... to materials’ had since become a watchword for sculptors like Epstein and the young Henry Moore. Of carving and modelling, the twin poles of traditional sculpting, Stokes prefers the first because it can allow stone to ‘come to life’. What, then, is it for stone to live? What are the qualities it possesses, which fine carving is to ...”