“... fatality rate ranged from 50 per cent to 80 per cent, so as many as one in four townsfolk may have been infected. Women, who tended to the sick, suffered disproportionately, as did the old and the young. Three months before plague struck Stratford, a young woman named Mary gave birth there to a son, William. She and her husband had lost their first ...”

“... The most terrifying comment made on the Abdication may well be that of Lord Beaverbrook, writing twenty years after the events in which he played such a prominent part: if the British people, he said, had been less absorbed in the affair of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson the energy thus saved might have been used to avert world war ...”

“... as ‘music: a system of organised sounds which give pleasure, and obey’ – ‘obeying’ may include ‘flouting’ – ‘the conventions of its grammar’? The organisation of pop music is imperceptible to me, its grammar foreign, and its pleasures non-existent. I readily concede that this is not the experience of everyone. The phenomenon is ...”

“... must, I’m afraid, be largely a catalogue of complaints. The first, with which many of the others may seem to be related, concerns the title, and the fact that the subject is so named throughout the book. Even on the thousandth repetition it still seems embarrassing. P.N. Furbank, in his biography of 1977-8, uses the surname throughout. As a young man Furbank ...”

“... just shown, in the lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1933), that women are driven by a penis-envy which may be sublimated into some vague desire for intellectual achievement but which can only be allayed by bearing a child, preferably male, as phallus? If H.D. dreamt of a princess stepping down towards water, to find and protect a baby, while she stood by as ...”

“... person is, what it is to live a life, and what a life is supposed to look like (one of his stories may be that no one is in a position to tell you that). To walk into a psychoanalyst’s consulting-room, like being born into a family, is to walk into a very elaborate family of stories about who one is supposed to be. The analyst ...”

“... had the word and the power’, in spite of some obvious exceptions: the researchers who knew, with Ernest Rutherford, that they were living in the glory days of the natural sciences; the engineers who saw no limits to the future progress of old and new technologies; the officials and businessmen of an empire that reached its maximum extent between the wars and ...”

“... of its functions. Stokes’s chapter on suicide begins with a remarkable letter from a man called Ernest Clark to the editor of the Daily Chronicle. Clark explains that ‘only the transcendental and aesthetic in life are worth our thought,’ and since they are crowded out by ‘the ugliness and vile monotony’ of his existence, he will have shot himself by ...”

“... least one chimp (which survived at Lindi for more than two years) came from the Mbandaka area, so may well have been one of Hahn’s west central African chimps. Because cages and play-cages were shared, just one such SIV-infected chimp might have caused widespread SIV infection throughout the colony. So even if Hahn is right, it doesn’t disprove the OPV ...”

“... discoveries had given vivid form to the idea that the dead do not disappear. And Janus, we may remember, the Roman god of gods, was the opener and closer of all things, who looked inward and outward, before and after, a pertinent god to have acquired, given Freud’s new-found preoccupations at the turn of the century. It is, of course, tendentious, to ...”

“... as no more than a ruling mythology or religion. If most (white) people regard it as truth that may only be because it suits them. Alternative belief-systems have at least an equivalent validity – equal or (from our Negroid, Inuit, East Asian or other point of view) actually superior or more useful. A striking example is cited by Kohn in the same ...”

“... to present, the picture of a cool, dispassionate and largely uncommitted observer. Mr Mortimer may see himself in this light, but few other people will so see him. For someone like him, it would have taken quite a feat of dissembling to achieve this result. A new party game could be played to determine which literary figures, living and past, could be ...”

“... or shouldn’t be in the lifetime of people mentioned in any way disparagingly. If yes, offence may be caused. If no, they’ve lost the chance to answer back. But if they’re famous, oughtn’t they to be prepared to take it either way? I know that’s easy to say, and I remember Jonathan Miller once telling me, and convincingly so, that nobody to whom it ...”

“... of our marriage, Alvarez has cast me in a variety of roles, from Jungle Jane to Giant Sloth. It may come as a surprise to him to find me among his critics. Life after Marriage follows much the same pattern as his best-selling The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. The personal bit, the friends, the literary figures. A formula that was perhaps worthy of ...”

“... restlessly. He passed through Coburg in 1819, shortly after the birth to his oldest brother, Duke Ernest, of a second son, christened Francis Charles August Albert Emmanuel, known always as Albert. Leopold paid little attention at the time. He did not get on particularly well with the Duke, who lacked the better Ernestine Wettin qualities. The boy’s ...”