“... her head and smoked it, and there would have been an end of your story.’ But there was an even more fundamental objection to Flynn’s plot. Was he ‘aware of the fact that James Brooke had been severely wounded in India, and deprived of his manhood’? Flynn laughed and shrugged. ‘You can’t have a motion picture without love,’ he said. ‘And you ...”

“... staggering mule-kicks ever meted out by an author to his readers. Bear in mind that the poem is more than 21,000 lines of blank verse – about twice the length of Paradise Lost. It was published in four monthly instalments, each containing three books of the poem, which appeared from November 1868 to February 1869. Browning, like Melville, was asking Jonah ...”

“... a gate set in the cemetery wall to the Mary Rankin Wing of St Pancras Hospital. As a young man, Thomas Hardy supervised the removal of bodies from part of the cemetery to make way for the trains. He placed the headstones round an ash tree sapling, now grown tall, where I stop sometimes to look at the stones crowding round the old tree like children ...”

“... be stipulated. Compared to this urgent caveat, the need to increase dosage over time was little more than a footnote: for most classical authorities it merited less attention than the other universal side-effect of regular use, constipation. Early Arab sources are the first to foreshadow the modern phenomenon of the addict. A 12th-century doctor noted that ...”

“... state. The State of Nature, meanwhile, was itself a site of conflict. The reductive party, with Thomas Hobbes at its head, saw human motivation as entirely egoistic at root (Hobbes’s problem was to explain how a mass of competing egos came up in the end with a system of law which protects the weak multitude). Locke’s State of Nature was much less ...”

“... Victorian historians vied with each other to compose panegyrics to him. The biography written by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, said that Alfred disproved once and for all the thesis that Christianity was ‘no faith for fighters’: while the Vikings at Ashdown passed the night before the battle singing the ‘Death-Song of Ragnar ...”

“... Then, in Mansfield Park, these words start being used in a new way. The stiff pater familias, Sir Thomas Bertram, returns from Antigua to find that his niece Fanny has progressed from ugly duckling to swan. He can’t help perceiving ‘in a grand and careless way’ that the thoroughly eligible Henry Crawford – rich, elegant, every inch a gentleman – is ...”

“... In recent years, nothing has done more to reinforce the European sense of cultural superiority than the sight of America’s televangelists. Easily stereotyped as politically reactionary, sexually hypocritical, intellectually retarded and financially dishonest, the televangelists confirmed every prejudice about American society ...”

“... Jane, too. He wrote, he says, with his heart’s blood. The physiological contribution would be more realistically seen as his digestive juices. He distrusted the world of literary evaluation, did not see how a man could honestly live by writing, and yet had to write. In February 1835, he asserts that he has sold nothing for 23 months, yet in March when the ...”

“... few persons,’ Anthony Powell wrote in John Aubrey and His Friends (1948), ‘of whom it would be more true to say that they were interested in everything.’ Aubrey, born in Wiltshire, attended Trinity College, Oxford in the 1640s, but his studies were interrupted by the rumble of civil war. He watched squadrons of soldiers train in New College gardens. He ...”

“... on manners; in paintings and novels. In his introductory essay to the first of these books, Keith Thomas proposes that the cultural historian should reconstruct from such evidence the ‘grammar of gesture’, as part of a larger attempt to define ‘all the codes and conventions which create the context for meaningful behaviour in the society under ...”

“... the air’: yet it conveyed the view, subsequently shared by many, that with Eden the facade was more important than the interior, the appearance more impressive than the reality. People recognised his ability as a negotiator, skilfully handling diplomatic problems with the support of the Foreign Office, but it was widely ...”

“... the world was smallpox-free, surveillance went on for two years after his illness. There were no more ‘natural’ cases and on 8 May 1980, Resolution WHA33.3 was signed at the eighth plenary meeting of the 33rd World Health Assembly. It declared that ‘the world and all its people’ had ‘won freedom from smallpox . . . which only a decade ago was ...”

“... Daddy’s return was his only request, ‘a suggestion that had nothing to do with making the play more commercial’. But Lahr has gathered up plenty of other evidence that Kazan wanted subtler and deeper changes: a Maggie less shrill, more sympathetic; some explanation of the trouble between Brick and Maggie, even maybe a ...”

“... how to make and use such texts. Katherine Storm Hindley’s Textual Magic rests on a catalogue of more than 1100 recipes (unfortunately the link to its accompanying online database is currently broken – send prayers to Isidore of Seville, patron saint of the internet). With this corpus of evidence, Hindley reveals the ways medieval people imagined the ...”