“... 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 ...”

“... How did he know? He never entered one. But he did spend a night in the ‘spike’, or casual ward (an annexe for tramps and vagrants), of a workhouse just outside London. Having shared the workhouse food and chatted with some of the inmates, he reported that the meal was ‘fit for a boa-constrictor’ and that the uniform was what was most ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill ...”

“... suffering from a peculiarly effective form of writer’s block. Once she is moved into a hospital ward, the ‘membrane’ or stimulus barrier separating her from the realities of pain and death is no longer intact. She is traumatised by the experience of living in a ‘country where everyone is dying or about to die’. When she is discharged and sent ...”

“... against Fascism sharpened their national consciousness into radical activism. They included Russel Ward, Ian Turner and Bob Gollan, who were all Communists when they embarked on their careers. Their influence on Australian history was perhaps even greater than that of their British equivalents, Hill, Thompson, Hobsbawm and Rudé, since they were there at the ...”

“... while reminding voters that Stephens had called for the UK to stop arming Israel. Pollokshields ward has the highest concentration of Muslims in Scotland – 27.8 per cent. Many of those coming out of the madrasa shook Stephens’s hand and promised him their vote. But Umar Ali, an IT worker who had supported the SNP, was minded to switch to ...”

“... Coleman went to Wellesley College and then married Loyd Ring Coleman. She gave birth to a son, John, in 1924, contracted puerperal fever, and was confined for two months as a mental patient in Rochester State Hospital. Recovered, she journeyed with her husband to Paris, where he worked in advertising. For a while Coleman wrote a society column for the ...”

“... he devoted hours of his time to the largely unrewarding work of a councillor in the St Pancras Ward of London. Thanks to Shaw, the first ladies’ lavatory in England was constructed at the top of Parkway in Camden Town. The campaign to build the loo was in its way an archetypally Shavian act of philanthropy, provoking gratifying howls from Tory ...”

“... and painters of modern life that manifested itself most memorably in 19th-century Paris. So are John Sloan’s etchings of New York tenements and city crowds (he, too, had worked for newspapers) and George Bellows’s lithographs of a prize fight, a psychiatric ward and couples in the park. In London and Paris, the ...”

“... Howard tackles the throes of childbirth and Laura Footes those of Crohn’s disease. A house by John Davies bursts with eerie, ghostly flames. The gallery door closes and the dark world outside looks darker. Ray Ward made me laugh, however. His ink drawings, bending round pasted-together eggboxes and plastic cartons to ...”

“... if – as Khrushchev was rumoured to want – it had first been published in Russia. Or Cancer Ward, or The First Circle? The strangely naive thing about the system, Glavlit, and the censor, the spravochnik, who has a sort of telephone directory at his elbow listing all impermissible subjects, is that it does not seem to realise how all-powerful it ...”

“... consigned to an important-old-folks home. It’s incarceration, but preferable to the psychiatric ward or provincial exile, and infinitely preferable to a death camp. And he will get his entry in the International Dictionary of Socialist Biography. It won’t tell the truth (not being a novel), nevertheless Grau’s journal can finish on a note of career ...”

“... the number of prosecutions and reduce the number of cases that fail’. The Guildford Four, Judith Ward and the numerous other recipients of West Midlands Serious Crime Squad-style justice are among those who benefited from the attentions of an all-powerful police force able to bring prosecutions without hindrance from a truly independent agency empowered to ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”