“... when exhausted, even offered money to passing schoolchildren to take it in turn to ring the door bell. One night well after midnight, some friends who lived opposite lured the smaller night shift of newspapermen away momentarily, while she and her family ran quickly across the mews into a friend’s house (they had left the door on the latch for just such an ...”

“... have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy. The chronology at the beginning of Plath’s Collected Prose attempts to raise her into a ...”

“... lineage. As far as the last is concerned – well, there’s the hidden Ireland uncovered by Daniel Corkery in 1928 (his study of 18th-century Munster appeared under that title), inhabited by people who took a very poor view indeed of the new English-speaking aristocracy that had ousted the old Irish-speaking one. ‘Valentine Brown’, as these purists ...”

“... should surely observe that request. The first word of the book is ‘I’, frequently an alarm bell in a biography, and there is a strong pong in the early pages of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder I Knew school. In fact, in respect of the biographer-subject relationship, there is one excellent joke which the author doesn’t intend and almost certainly ...”

“... the vouchers were rejected with the disdain she feared at all the shops she usually went to – Daniel Neal did not X-ray any old child’s feet. The only place that accepted them was a gloomy little cobbler’s shop which, as I remember it, was hidden away under a near derelict railway arch in the fashion wasteland of King’s Cross. The Dickensian and ...”

“... wife, Reyna (some members of Frederick’s side of the family were said to refer to her as ‘Taco Bell’). But the real sticking point was the question of how to divide up the family assets. David had four sons, the two eldest of whom, Aidan and Howard, played important roles in the Barclay businesses. Frederick had a daughter, Amanda, who didn’t appear ...”

“... remarks; ‘it is much rarer to find men writing as women.’ Two distinguished exceptions were Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, who took shelter behind their female protagonists. The Brontës are an obvious example of female writers posing as male, or at least behind the carefully androgynous pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton ...”

“... slightly mad. Perhaps all diarists expose a sort of madness in themselves. The diary of raving-mad Daniel Pratt, Dandiprat’s Days, is a source of surprisingly innocent merriment – for Pratt’s sort of madness would seem to be no laughing matter. He is a senior civil servant, a wealthy bachelor of 54 who has never made love to a woman; every now and then ...”

“... the range of Hunter’s researches, and both presumably intended for eventual publication. Under a bell-jar is a strange, plant-like object whose once delicate tracery is clear only in Sharp’s engraving. It is a ‘bronchial tree’: a fragile cast made, with great skill, by injecting wax into a lung and corroding away the tissue to leave visible the ...”

“... for its weaponry. ‘Do we want to see Hitler in Independence Hall making fun of the Liberty Bell?’ William Bullitt, Roosevelt’s ambassador to France, asked a year before Pearl Harbor. US war planners were already envisioning the utopia to come. Its premise was the defeat of Germany and Japan, but also the break-up of European empires into a world of ...”

“... to Jenner’s. Similar objections have been raised against the work of the French immunologist Daniel Zagury, who developed an Aids vaccine that he gave to uninfected individuals, including himself. Concerns over his work led to a protracted inquiry and to a ban by the French government. Even today, the methods Jenner adopted are able to stimulate ...”

“... leave colonial tours shaking the experience out of their heads as if in imitation of the Liberty Bell, Philly’s cracked symbol of freedom. For years, the historical society responsible for the site quibbled with local activists who held that it was important to memorialise the fact that Ona ‘Oney’ Judge, an enslaved woman forced to work for ...”

“... The enclosure in front of me also has a pool, and a bridge spanning a hoop of tunnel. At 2 p.m., a bell rings. The shed doors open and a gang of Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus), easily identifiable by the pale crescents splashed across the dark fur of their chests, bundles out into the steamy April sunshine. Muzzles flickering aloft, they scent ...”

“... what more brilliant if small-scale artists had done in this Latin inscription of 1592 on the fifth bell in the Chapel Tower of Winchester College:  CAELESTESAUDITE SONOS  MORTALESThis says: ‘Bell-notes are prayers from earth to heaven as well as blessings descending to earth from the skies.’ The finest inscriptions ...”

“... greatest successes in France. By 1910, according to Delphine Lévy, his collectors included Gide, Daniel Halévy, Fénéon, Bonnard, Pissarro and Maximilien Luce. Authorised by Signac to purchase him something from Sickert’s show at Bernheim Jeune in 1909, Fénéon chose L’Affaire de Camden Town. It was also, though it was not obvious at the time, the ...”