“... of Blake’s Newton as hero in the courtyard of the British Library). In the 1930s, a group of young biologists in Cambridge associated with the embryologist Joseph Needham formed the Theoretical Biology Club (TBC), calling themselves ‘organicists’ in an attempt to transcend the tired opposition between mechanism and vitalism. At the International ...”

“... be tactfully retrieved from service as paperweights and doorstops, chiefly thanks to the work of a young volunteer, Mary Porter, author of What Rome Was Built With (1907). Porter, whose formal education had been truncated by paternal edict, eventually studied crystallography in Germany. She returned to Oxford with a fellowship in the 1930s and helped revise ...”

“... I issued a Proclamation prohibiting the publishing of reports or writing on duels and appointed Francis Bacon as attorney general, inviting him to put a stop to the practice. Bacon described the duel as a brutal urge for revenge dressed up in Italian ‘affections’. Honour, he argued, was an innate moral quality revealed by an individual’s ...”

“... of this is Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Man I Killed’, a preternaturally lucid description of a young Vietnamese soldier blown up by the narrator’s grenade. O’Brien’s precise, almost entranced detailing of the star-shaped hole where one of the man’s eyes used to be, his torn ear lobe, his scattered sandals, a butterfly alighting on his chin, are ...”

“... war I felt little sympathy for what I considered an intrusion of the West.’ He gave advice to a young Australian who wrote saying that he could not get down to work: ‘Directly after breakfast you sit down at the table with a blank sheet of paper and a pen and a glass of whiskey. You drink the glass of whiskey and you begin to write anything that comes ...”

“... was an act of love to be presented. Her writing has none of that endearing and secret vanity which Francis Kilvert’s diary was to have, and in which the reader can now share. The ‘quarrel with himself’ was for Wordsworth the simultaneous assertion of his private vision and of his human heart and principles. When he writes of ‘the soothing thoughts that ...”

“... well in the 1960s, Carter saw her status go, as she put it, ‘from being a very promising young writer to being completely ignored in two novels’. At this distance those novels, the dystopian fantasies Heroes and Villains and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, as well as The Passion of New Eve which followed, may seem like ...”

“... response to his work: they’ve attenuated the sensationalism, far more so than with the art of Francis Bacon, whom he admires and emulates. It’s as if the works themselves have swallowed all the barbiturates and decongestants displayed in those gleaming cabinets. So many of them have become iconic that they now wear a classical, self-important air. Hirst ...”

“... didn’t think he could be murdered in cold blood inside his church. Significantly, the new Pope Francis has reopened the case for his canonisation. If it is successful Romero will be recognised officially as a martyr. But he did not intend to die. The most eloquent witnesses of all are the survivors, who can raise their voices to confront the forces that ...”

“... of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (reg. 1260-94). While his elders transacted their business, the young Marco ingratiated himself with the Great Khan thanks to his storytelling gifts. He had discovered that Kublai’s ambassadors bored him to tears with dull pragmatic reports of their journeys, when the cultivated ruler yearned for tales about the ‘wonders ...”

“... as many obstacles as in The Shadow-Line but reaches a different and more wondrous conclusion (Francis Ford Coppola borrowed it for Apocalypse Now, his film version of Heart of Darkness). Touching shore at long last in the dark, Marlow wakes from the sleep of exhaustion to a silent dawn: I opened my eyes … and then I saw the men of the East – they ...”

“... favourite then joined up with two courtiers, Endymion Porter (who had been born in Spain) and Sir Francis Cottington, and set sail for France on 19 February. They were thoroughly sick on the voyage. The small party was conspicuous enough to be identified by a group of German tourists outside Paris, so they took the precaution of buying periwigs to thicken ...”

“... told me you were dead’; he wrote the words of the ‘Eton Boating Song’; and in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust.’ Ten years later, Johnson was ...”

“... Is there any in her novels?... Was Katherine simply mistaken in thinking she was pregnant by Francis Heinemann? Did she knowingly mislead L.M.? Or was she – against all medical probability – in fact with child.... How does someone who has no religious faith and is only 31 “accept” the imminence of death? How does anyone do that at 31? How does a ...”

“... such an idle reprobate would provoke Johnson’s censure. But the lightly sketched portrait of young Minim appears in a journal whose title commits it to defending a life of easy wins, as long as that life cannot hurt anyone. The key lesson of Minim’s petty existence is that – however malicious his intentions – he remains innocent of damage. Johnson ...”