“... and facial contours provide a lot of information about ethnicity. She writes about a decomposed young woman bound in tape and folded into a suitcase, who she could confidently say was of East Asian origin: ‘Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, Japan or China. I didn’t think she had the facial characteristics that would take her south into Malaysia or ...”

“... sense of ‘improvement’. Ekman’s personal testament forms the afterword. His journey from Young-Turk Skinnerist to mature Darwinian is instructive. His evidence for the universality of expressions offended his teachers, especially Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson – cultural relativists who had seen eugenics in action and saw it as politically ...”

“... a thousand sermons, and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas,’ he wrote in his early twenties. He showed an early talent for art, and was sent to the Slade through the benevolence of a local Lady Bountiful. He emerged from it in 1912, an almost dwarfish figure a couple of inches over five ...”

“... had converged to discuss painting and the human condition. The thought that David Sylvester and Francis Bacon were caught up in this dialogue seemed at once daunting and salutary to some of us then learning to paint in the same town. Their Interviews – first published in 1975 – conveyed such unassailable aplomb. ‘All art has now become completely a ...”

“... my patients once fell twenty feet from it. Gary Hobbes wasn’t normally a tree-climber: he was a young man with schizophrenia who, after taking a cocktail of MDMA, became convinced he had transformed into a cat. Witnesses recounted that on the day of his fall he had been prowling the local streets examining the contents of bins, before scaling the elm to ...”

“... first number of the Powys Review, in 1977, George Steiner blamed Dr Leavis for praising Theodore Francis Powys above John Cowper, thus denying J. C. his meed of lectures, tutorials and research students. Nevertheless, the book-addicted young, the Colin Wilsons of our time, find John Cowper instantly available in the heart ...”

“... Rebecca West liked short men. Towards the end of her life a young journalist went to interview her. He arrived late, to hear West’s companion announce: ‘He’s worth waiting for!’ When West appeared her face fell. ‘Oh, you’re tall,’ she said damningly. ‘Small men are so energetic.’ Her posthumous novel Sunflower features fictional versions of two small men with big names: little H ...”

“... In March 1992 I received a printed invitation from Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he had given in Berlin on St Patrick’s Day 1941. I wondered, when I read it, why Francis had sent this. Over the years he had invited me to several events, but he had never had invitations printed ...”

“... that greatly resembles human kissing’. Similarly, it may be that the hoarse breathing that young chimps produce when they’re tickled is best described as laughing. Even the way they behave towards the person doing the tickling seems familiar, first pushing the tickler’s hand away then coming back ‘begging for more, holding their breath while ...”

“... in her novels are easily routed. Once they have ceased to cause pain, like Chéri, the graceless young lover whom Lea, the ageing courtesan, sees off so magisterially in La Fin de Chéri, they are demoted to respectful girlishness. The bisexual Colette despised their timidity, wrote them down, wrote them out. There is an animus here that is only slowly ...”

“... historian, theorist of experimental inquiry and prophet of organised scientific research, Francis Bacon combined soaring intellectual ambition with a relentless quest for worldly advancement. The scholar who sought to reclassify the whole of human knowledge and lay the foundations for the systematic conquest of nature was also the careerist who ...”

“... crew led by Captain John Logan, who did not respect the law of the tongue, and tried to haul in a young humpback without allowing the orcas their due. Old Tom struggled against the whalers, losing some teeth in the process: when he was washed up dead sometime later, there were abscesses in his jaw where his teeth had been broken, and he seemed to have died of ...”

“... residual still, that there might be a mystical, if misty, relationship between reading and power. Francis Spufford, a third of the way into The Child that Books Built, tells the following story: I learnt to read around my sixth birthday. I was making a dinosaur in school from crepe bandage and toilet rolls when I started to feel as if an invisible pump was ...”

“... divided into two shield-shaped parts, recording on the left the dates, offices and honours of Francis Howard, 5th baron of Effingham, appointed governor of Virginia by Charles II. In the other column Francis laments the loss of his young wife, ‘dilectissima Philadelphia ...”