“... Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ came out at much the same time as John Pocock’s The Diary of a London Schoolboy 1826-30, published by the Camden Society. John Pocock, 12¾, decisively a real person, was a builder’s son who lived on the edge of Kilburn, two miles out of London ...”

“... at Munich University; the following year he served briefly as an orderly, first in an amputation ward, then in a ward for sexually transmitted diseases, which provided material for the scurrilous work that was becoming his trademark. He knew which side he was on during the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the war ...”

“... level, there is rivalry among two of Freddie’s pupils to fill the part of Prince Arthur in King John. One boy is crude but magnetic and destined for stardom; the other is finer-grained, a true Thespian. Their opposition is less interesting than Fitzgerald’s sharply accurate evocation of an old-style West End production of Shakespeare, footlights and ...”

“... George Eliot borrowed it for the marriage of Dorothea and Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch; Mrs Humphry Ward gave a vivid picture of Pattison as Squire Wendover in Robert Elsmere, a Victorian best-seller; and Rhoda Broughton, the novelist who knew the Rector best, produced a cruel portrait in her slight and perfunctory novel Belinda. But this, alas, only ...”

“... a life-saving blood transfusion on the grounds that it was contrary to his faith. Mr Justice Ward, as he was then, gave the hospital leave to treat E against his will, declaring that the courts ‘should be very slow to allow an infant to martyr himself’. Where a child has sufficient intelligence and understanding to comprehend their medical ...”

“... of the 19th century. For example, his work made a deep impression on the young and precocious Mary Ward, later better known as Mrs Humphry Ward, author of the hugely successful Robert Elsmere (1888). Through the good offices of her uncle, Matthew Arnold, she met Renan in Paris, and thanks to the patronage of ...”

“... this prosopographical approach to sanctity has become more and more popular. The American scholar John Mecklin studied the saint as a ‘culture type’ in 1941. In his book Altruistic Love (1951), the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin refined Coulton’s analysis by investigating the social origins of some three thousand saints. He concluded that ‘the ...”

“... Mao II was prompted in part by that famous picture of a terrified Salinger flinging up an arm to ward off a photographer.) In writing about Gray, DeLillo is, not for the first time, tackling an important contemporary American icon. His career has shown a consistent willingness to write about subjects in the forefront of popular consciousness: American ...”

“... and that if she wasn’t then she’d finally met her match. Robert Elsmere (1888) set Mrs Humphry Ward on Eliot’s vacant throne, and ten years later The Sorrows of Satan (1895) established Marie Corelli as heir apparent. Trollope would have been provoked by Woolf’s celebrated requirement for women writers. A room of one’s own and £500 a year wasn’t a ...”

“... prolific: nobody could begin to say how many thousands of his pictures have survived, and how John Bonehill, the curator of this exhibition, decided on his final selection I can’t imagine. Sandby was also enormously versatile: he worked in watercolour, bodycolour (gouache) and oil, he etched, he was the first professional artist in Britain to work in ...”

“... novels’, she traced the change. Adah, an authorial stand-in, has woken up in the maternity ward with a rubber tube running into her nose, and her baby being cared for in the hospital nursery. While spending several days in recovery, she becomes curious – like Sylvia Plath collecting notes for the poem that will become ‘Tulips’ – about the other ...”

“... The irony obviously is that it was not so easy, at least if you were interested in results. Joshua Ward (1685-1761) was widely regarded as a quack, and drawn as such by Hogarth, along with the Epsom bone-setter Sally Mapp, in The Company of Undertakers. But he put back George II’s dislocated thumb when the licensed physicians were all telling the King he had ...”

“... he was forever taking up his pen to spell out alternatives. A series of letters to Mrs Humphry Ward, several previously unpublished, make the process explicit. ‘I have been full to the brim of interest & admiration,’ he declared after finishing her Helbeck of Bannisdale in 1898: ‘The whole thing is done in a way to make the book run an immense chance ...”

“... are three weeks’ massive priapism. The spiritual effect is longer-lasting. Lying in the sting ward of Wangaratta hospital, his testicles swollen to the size of melons, he now has the balls to tell a visiting princess of the blood royal exactly what satyriasis syndrome is (‘having a hard-on as long as a polo stick’). It is, for Leon, a momentous ...”

“... not quite the chaos of Looking Glass chess but it remained a symbolic landscape, which was used to ward off chaos. The military theme in his work fits into this picture. Like Ted Hughes, one of his major influences, Longley had a father who fought in the First World War and the imagery of the Somme – corpses, helmets, gas-masks – keeps on turning up in his ...”