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“... origin of the substance in front of you, inorganic slime can often seem part of what William Ian Miller, in The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), called ‘the organic world of generative rot … life soup, fecundity itself’. For most of history, as Lehoux points out, spontaneous generation was a fact, not a theory. The distinction between muddy slime and living ...”

“... it was the Middle Ages (or his idea of them) that really got to him. He read Malory’s Morte D’Arthur repeatedly, together with Spenser, William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, and several popular novels set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was ...”

“... in the auditorium. Until 1957, Matthews had been a favourite son at the newspaper: the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, even authorised a loan of $16,000 so he could buy a house in London. In Gay Talese’s book about the Times, The Kingdom and the Power, we see Matthews in 1967 sitting ‘rather forlornly in Room 1048 along a corridor of editorial writers ...”

“... colleague Tommaso Caccini, and the Florentine philosopher Lodovico delle Colombe. According to Arthur Koestler, however, Galileo was the victim of his own fatal flaws: ‘vanity, jealousy and self-righteousness combined into a demoniac force which drove him to the brink of self-destruction’. According to Stillman Drake, who has devoted a lifetime of ...”

“... Leopold of the Belgians) to ‘civilise’ Greenland’s Eskimos. The protagonist of the novel, Arthur Granger, is an aristocratic and unsuccessful novelist who betrays his own cherished chivalric ideals for the sake of a girl-agent from the Fourth Dimension. And the gesture of the novel, as epitomised in Granger, is an ‘aristocratic ...”

“... once noticed, their beauty is seen as something to be guarded against: as a threat to what Jane Miller in Women writing about men calls ‘men’s lifetime objectives’, and beyond that, to the social order which is coincident with men’s lifetime objectives. Newman hasn’t arranged her anthology chronologically but if one takes the pieces in the order ...”

“... The memory of Nazi racial science had hardly dimmed when, in 1969, the Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen argued in an article in the Harvard Educational Review that low IQ scores and poor academic performance among disadvantaged minorities in America was genetic in origin; after all, Jensen explained, twin studies had shown that IQ was largely ...”

“... 1929, the Labour politician John Strachey (Oswald Mosley was best man); second, in 1935, Chester Arthur III, known as Gavin Arthur, the spoiled grandson of the 21st American president. Both men seem to have married Murphy – dubbed by New York papers the ‘Bachelor Heiress’ – in some portion for her money: Strachey ...”

“... a more specialised admirer: history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay ...”

“... even how much good it might have done Mrs Thatcher had she gone to bed with Meryl Streep and/or Arthur Scargill.) But no: the book is clearly not a spoof. Seymour-Smith is being quite serious; he is, he says, aware that ‘some critics and readers will call me “morbid”. I sympathise with them.’ To which one can only reply that ‘morbid’ may not be ...”

“... is the history of the Templars, whose legendary Grand Masters were to Languedoc and Provence what Arthur is to Wessex. One aspect of Durrell’s ambiguous Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which have ...”

“... cast members) and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to reassure him that all the ...”

“... cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which ...”

“... he first appeared, in the novella A Study in Scarlet in 1887, no one took much notice. But when Arthur Conan Doyle repackaged Holmes and Watson in short stories for the Strand Magazine, the trifle improvised for pin money by a struggling young doctor soon turned into an apotheosis that bemused, enriched and finally exasperated him. He tried to exorcise the ...”

“... was lucky to have Robert, but then Charlotte Brontë was perhaps equally lucky to have had Arthur Nicholls. Had Charlotte lived, she might have continued to write good things as private woman and happy spouse, blissfully submitting her letters and manuscripts to her husband’s censorship. Elizabeth was also, in a sense, a conscious and loving ...”