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“... in this field through the first half of the 19th century, from Xavier Bichat to Claude Bernard, created something significantly new. For the first time, a programme of vivisection experiments upon animals was set in motion, deploying surgical intervention (sectioning, ablation, etc) to explore, under vigorously controlled conditions, problems such ...”

“... Berry’s death in 1927 may have left Wharton ‘utterly rudderless’, as she wrote to Bernard Berenson; but she still managed to get into his Paris apartment and to burn almost all the letters she had ever written to him. ‘No words can say, because such things are unsayable, how the influence of his thought, his character, his deepest ...”

“... longer a member’. As he was to remark on his deathbed, ‘I know this much, they make damn good porter – I wish I had a pint of it now.’ In the midst of triumphant electioneering, taking the credit for the Home Rule candidate’s victory and drinking ‘God’s quantity of champagne’, he found time to pay court to May Murray, the ‘delicately ...”

“... to deflect most of the money away from the obvious political uses that had been intended. George Bernard Shaw’s indignant account of a subsequent meeting of the Fabian executive, at which Webb ‘hinted that the bequest had been left to him to dispose of as he thought fit, and that the executive had nothing to do with it’, was not just Shavian ...”

“... or a person instead of a work. My work’s never become ‘a Brainard’. Or even a Jainard or a Bernard or a Joe. Here are the last six ‘I remember’s from his sparklingly original and ‘totally great’ (to use one of his own favourite locutions) memoir, I Remember, issued in four instalments between 1970 and 1973, and then collected in a single ...”

“... for change to keep things interesting. In Voices, he arrives at a Reykjavík hotel where a porter has been found stabbed in a basement room. The dead man is dressed as Santa Claus; a condom hangs from his penis. The hotel manager doesn’t want to alarm his guests – tourists visiting ‘the distant land of winter’ – but Erlendur checks into an ...”

“... but with no detail at all. On 14 April 1975 it was: ‘dinner at the house of gallery-owner Claude Bernard with George Lawson (drunk) and Mick Jagger – excellent food but boring really.’ In vain you look for an account of the conversation that made the evening so tedious, or even a soupçon of insight into what made the food so good. Nothing. Not here, not ...”

“... and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d written about him, she has tried to read Kafka but without success. For the same reason she ...”

“... sought his fortune in the seething medical marketplace of London. The metropolis then was, as Roy Porter has said, ‘a world of quacks’. It was also a world of orthodox medical princes. And sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. The properly credentialled physicians who rode about in their coaches-and-six, and lashed out at the unprincipled ...”

“... 14 years. The end came in 1986. Waugh was the victim of a practical joke after his friend Henry Porter, who was working on the Sunday Times, sent him a letter apparently from Claire Tomalin, the paper’s literary editor, asking him to review Mae West Is Dead, Adam Mars-Jones’s selection of lesbian and gay fiction, adding that she would ‘expect a ...”

“... hostess, when Bergé was already the lover and business manager of the modish but bad painter Bernard Buffet. Yves was then the slim and fetching 21-year-old heir to the undisputed haute-couture throne of Christian Dior, who had just died of a heart attack at 52, leaving his famous fashion company in the lurch. Tender young Yves had taken over, because ...”

“... not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he was; and Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw, who were hardly more than clerks. And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped for ...”

“... dad’s a doctor; he’s a nurse. A gardener.’ Yasin’s father, Abdulaziz, 52, was actually a porter at University College Hospital. His mother, Faouzia, was involved in the sewing group at the Westway Trust. ‘She sat by the window,’ a colleague said, ‘dropping a stitch when she saw something funny outside.’ R.D.’s family were from Casablanca ...”