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“... was of infinitely greater importance than it is in the aseptic atmosphere of the maternity ward in which almost all of our babies first get fed. But colostrum was not white; it did not look like, smell like, taste like, mother’s milk. Custom, and medical lore, decreed therefore that a mother should not breastfeed her child till colostrum ceased to ...”

“... who had stopped to inspect him. She saw only his gums, and recoiled in shock. Like others on the ward, he seemed thin and malnourished. Small wonder, she thought, for how on earth did they manage to eat? Greenacre found that in fact there were many more recoveries among Cotton’s untreated, or partially treated, patients than among those he had ...”

“... this man’s semen, though she presumably passes within range of a lavatory on her way to the ward: the book has quite a lot of fast-moving, gripping and orginal sex, including a scene in which three women, in various parts of a house, have more or less simultaneous and audible orgasms. There is an adolescent son who induces his 15-year-old sister, a ...”

“... pieces for the LRB; the first, published pretty much exactly twenty years ago, was a review of Peter Taylor’s Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco – ‘a marvellous book’. Later in the piece a ‘glorious leak’ undoes an attempt by the makers of Marlboro cigarettes to stop the world seeing film of the Marlboro cowboys dying of lung ...”

“... upon him when he was ‘in the British Army, a psychiatrist sitting in padded cells in my own ward with completely psychotic patients, doomed to deep insulin and electric shocks in the middle of the night. For the first time it dawned upon me that it was almost impossible for a patient to be a pal or for a patient to have a snowball’s chance in hell of ...”

“... Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression or revelation of intimate materials – he does ...”

“... novelist, I found myself in what seemed like a matter of months branch secretary of my local ward and assistant secretary of my constituency party in a period of exceptional turbulence. It was a rapid and brusque introduction to some of the realities of modern British party politics, a crash course I have not regretted in spite of the frustrations ...”

“... There have been other general books, but Woodcock’s has been by far the most successful. Peter Marshall’s Demanding the impossible is a broad survey – an expensive hardback, efficiently written, similarly designed for ordinary readers but with plenty of notes to please scholars. Like Woodcock, Marshall is close to the subject, neither an academic ...”

“... spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked ...”

“... to its lure. ‘Jingoism’ is a word used to condemn the enthusiasms of others, but also to ward off their fatal attraction. Since 1945, the quarrels of peacetime in Britain have been made to seem that much more mean and interminable by the memory of wartime solidarity. Now that we have peace of a sort again, the same nostalgia preys upon the business ...”

“... Kent had the highest infection rates in the country. By the middle of the month the council ward of Sheppey East, on the Isle of Sheppey, had an infection rate of 1917 per 100,000 – seven times the level in the UK as a whole.The lockdown, with its complicated system of different tiers for different regions, appeared to suppose a virus of limited ...”

“... The Thorndike laboratory became a model for establishing a working liaison between laboratory and ward. It was in the mid-1930s that the great gunturret of scientific medicine swung round to train upon infectious disease. If treatment could be started early enough in the course of the disease, Ehrlich’s neoarsphenamine was effective in the treatment of ...”

“... rally. There are silences – the prophylactic silences of things ‘better not said’ which ward off anger and offer no hostages to embarrassment; the silences of children who have feelings, but no words to express them; and there is the near-catatonic silence of those who have words but are governed by a code of laconic understatement which precludes ...”

“... pack Radio City – his real heyday was twenty years back. When he appeared in the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman series on television in 1966 it was as a myth rather than a contemporary. He died in 1987. In the movie the performances keep pace with the glitter and the hokum for a while. Michael Douglas as Liberace acts up onstage and off, twinkles with a coy ...”

“... exposure and dedicated attention, I can improve my responses. Perhaps, through practice, I can ward off the demons of mutism. Again, my own experience bears this out: when I was younger I found it difficult to discover much of interest in some forms or works, whereas now I can breeze into a show of abstract painting, say, and find much to comment on. It ...”