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“... Replying in 1934 to a Japanese poet who had asked for advice about writing ‘modern’ poetry, William Empson recommended ‘verse with a variety of sorts of feeling in it . . . it might be a good thing to try to show the clash of different philosophies, and social comedy, and quote lines of poetry by people quite different from you that you have thought especially good ...”

“... in droves in the same period. A solar eclipse was about to take place. Two rival astronomers, William Whiston and Edmond Halley, had predicted where it would reach totality. As he had done once before, in 1715, Halley published in advance a map of the shadow that the eclipse would project on the earth, as seen from above – a brilliant feat of visual ...”

“... his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula ...”

“... memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or heard on headphones is ...”

“... reputation acquired in the last twenty-five years by the fairly minor Victorian medical figure, William Acton, whom he rescued from oblivion in The Other Victorians. Whatever he feels, he has released a genie of formidable energy. Laqueur doesn’t give a footnote for his quotation from Acton: that would be like footnoting a phrase from Hamlet or the ...”

“... In 1919, after prolonged study, the Harvard ethologist William Morton Wheeler pronounced the male wasp ‘an etiological nonentity’. An animal behaviourist had scrutinised the male wasp and found – no behaviour. We can well imagine the male wasp’s response to such a verdict: his initial shock and hurt; his descent into a period of depressed introspection; his eventual decision to improve his act ...”

“... he was impressed by Flemish painting. Later he studied at Ghent and in the Antwerp Academy. Unlike William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Edward Burne-Jones, Brown profited from a broad and thorough education in the business of painting. Later, his art became a passion and a vocation. But it never ceased to be a job from which a living had somehow to be ...”

“... renaissance (to a considerable extent an Anglo-Irish affair). His not altogether helpful champion, Thomas MacGreevy, loudly claimed him for Ireland, but Samuel Beckett, deploring this as he deplored attempts to exaggerate his own Irishness, claimed Yeats as an international master. That, as it happens, was Yeats’s own view. In all modesty he declared himself ...”

“... are to be found in the index: Piltdown, Paul Kammerer of The Midwife Toad and the infamous William T. Summerlin. This last is the only case of a fraud in which I have been involved as a witness for the prosecution: Summerlin worked at the largest cancer research institute in the world, the Sloan-Kettering in New York, under the patronage of its ...”

“... pleased with themselves, so convinced that they represented sensibility in its highest form. Then William was always stealing Sam’s ideas and appropriating his contacts, with a never-failing air of disinterested benevolence, and in the sacred name of friendship. Robert Southey, Sam’s great friend, Sara’s brother-in-law, another promising young man in ...”

“... as it must have been in life. Observing that he had ‘the most glittering IQ you ever met’, William Barrett at Partisan Review said of Jarrell that ‘one would be unlikely to take him for a poet at all, so intensely cerebral did he appear to be.’ In New York Jarrell’s nervous defensiveness intensified this impression – ‘uneasy with New York ...”

“... cranky with each book he published after the USA trilogy. Of the stars of the class of 1918, only William Faulkner survived gracefully, protected by a thick cloak of obscurity until the very end. The class of ’45, those writers who attained majority, or at least draft age, during the Second World War, is more difficult to assess: they are closer to us, and ...”

“... hands of a Popish Malignant Company.’ At Putney in the winter of 1647, Cromwell had repudiated Thomas Harrison’s demand that the king be put on trial. But whatever its motivation – and there is no need to fasten on any single motive – the eventual execution enabled Cromwell and Ireton to stamp out the movement for democracy in the army and to ...”

“... man, but he did invent the Zoopraxiscope, a rotating version of the 19th-century magic lantern. Thomas Edison, along with William Dickson, invented the Kinetoscope, the machine that launched the commercial film industry, in 1891; in Edison’s Kinetoscope Parlours viewers peeped through a hole in the top of a wooden box ...”

“... case that God’s favour had overseen the peaceful transfer of the English throne from James II to William and Mary; practical questions about when, after moments of rebellion or usurpation, it was proper to give de facto allegiance to a newly ‘settled’ government; and historical arguments about the preservation of the ancient English constitution. The ...”