“... pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs matter here. By the time he arrived on the island in the 1550s the French privateer François Le Clerc had lost one of his in a naval battle with the British off Guernsey and contrived a wooden replacement: Jambe ...”

“... readers, to whom he had dedicated the book, would consider him ‘a foul-mouthed pimp, a dirty old man’. Yet in his tale of Alibech and Rustico (Day Three, Story Ten), he had instructed girls in a new style of holiness. Deep in the Theban desert, the story goes, a young virgin called Alibech decides to dedicate herself to God. After two holy men send her ...”

“... published in 1895 when Crane was only 23, is short and centres on the battlefield experience of a man younger still, Henry Fleming, who worries that in the test of war he will prove a coward, and then does. Some rough germ of an idea for the novel had been with Crane for years. As a child he fantasised about war and in his teens he contemplated West Point and ...”

“... Vallery Gréard, recounted how he shifted his focus after his more intellectual friend, Paul Chenavard, told him that his portraits of apostles remained inferior to their pictorial models, whereas his depiction of an ordinary young man playing a cello was ‘really personal and most excellent’. Moral: only by ...”

“... over some of its functions. Stokes’s chapter on suicide begins with a remarkable letter from a man called Ernest Clark to the editor of the Daily Chronicle. Clark explains that ‘only the transcendental and aesthetic in life are worth our thought,’ and since they are crowded out by ‘the ugliness and vile monotony’ of his existence, he will have shot ...”

“... second volume (like the first) is meticulously edited; the notes themselves provide an embarras de richesses, with enough arcane detail to keep scholars busy for a decade. Over a quarter of the tome is taken up by appendices, biographies, bibliography, and Darwin’s questionnaires, fragments, manuscript alterations and so forth. This series is already ...”

“... Domènech i Montaner used unadorned brick and industrial iron for his café-restaurant in the Parc de la Ciutadella; 16 years later he used a steel frame for his concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana, making it the first curtain-wall building in Spain and one of the first in the world. Both buildings sought to ...”

“... here?’ next to the lines ‘The scattered, ambushed/Flesh of labourers’ from ‘The Tollund Man’ – but no commas.My father wasn’t one to make things like this up, so the commas must be there somewhere, and it may well be that he added some other punctuation: the odd full stop, perhaps even a semi-colon or colon. Indeed, in his marginal notes to ...”

“... off the floor to safety’. In London a 24-hour courtship preceded her marriage to Wilhelm Wendt de Kerlor, a follower of Madame Blavatsky, and, in 1916, the couple decided to go to New York. It was then, in the years she spent in America during and after the First World War, that Schiaparelli found the intellectual and artistic stimulation for which she ...”

“... Men’.In this world, where every master must in his turn serve as somebody else’s ‘man’, to be made ‘masterless’, like the ‘houseless’ denizens of King Lear’s heath, was to suffer social annihilation: it was almost impossible to conceive of a fully human existence outside the ranks of service. A well-trained servant became, as ...”

“... the farmyard animals she had known in Bordeaux, but found some solace in Sunday walks in the Bois de Boulogne, or outings to the Jardin des Plantes, where Raimond was eventually employed as an illustrator by the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.Raimond was a dreamer, and rapidly fell under the influence of various utopian socialist sects. The ...”

“... was ‘part of Europe’, with ‘the EU on our borders’. Are you with Moscow or Brussels, a man or a girl’s blouse? Or can you be both? These were familiar themes in the election build-up and they’ve persisted. Whoever came to power, it seemed, would want to contrive an enviable dual status for the country a few years from now, cutting manly trade ...”

“... He remains one of the great outsiders and rogues in British politics: a man who lived down his earlier reputation as a radical to bring his biting sarcasm to the service of the Tories, always able to command an appreciative audience, albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment ...”

“... some the only proper receptacle of knowledge about this noble organ. Thus we come to 1860, and to Paul Broca, who in these pages emerges as a faintly flawed giant on the track of hemispheric differentiation. Initially, though, it is a differentiation between front and back, rather than left and right. Broca, a Huguenot, was predisposed to localisation of ...”

“... that Gerry Kelly, one of Sinn Fein’s chief negotiators at Stormont, is a highly placed IRA man who is not even a member of the Party. Kelly, who was sentenced to life imprisonment after the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, may or may not be a member of the IRA army council, but he is certainly a member of Sinn Fein: he stood unsuccessfully at last year’s ...”