“... unfavourably to Machiavelli, Herod, Absalom, Heliogabalus, Sardanapalus, Decius, Nebuchadnezzar, Julian the Apostate and Nero. In the summer of 1589, a Dominican monk named Jacques Clément entered the King’s camp outside Paris, claiming to have secret information: ushered into Henri III’s presence, he took a knife from his sleeve and stabbed the King to ...”

“... spots it more quickly than we do, that he calls in the style-police as soon as the typewriter bell rings for the end of the line, and that this makes it all right. Hamilton’s robust unimpressibility has always been one of his strengths as a critic: here there are too many occasions when he yields not just to ‘easy superiority of tone’ but to a ...”

“... for your hopes’.Barnes’s ideas about the supremacy of form came initially from Clive Bell (which he later denied), and his hopes for the democratic usefulness of art from his friend Dewey – about the only person with whom he never quarrelled. Barnes firmly declared the ‘irrelevancy of subject matter to plastic values’; so you examined a ...”

“... the other, and old husbands and wives clasp hands and raise arms together, and two boys, like Julian Bell and John Cornford, who’ve been lying out on the lawn get to their feet and sing – and moreover know the words. 30 July. In the week that Paul Foot is buried the Court of Appeal orders that the Hickeys, acquitted after being wrongly imprisoned ...”

“... or that the largest picture on view would be a frothy, larky double portrait by Vanessa Bell of Mr and Mrs Maynard Keynes. The show is densely hung, with ten sections crammed into three rooms; but this rather serves as a confirmation of the hurlyburlyness of art’s history, and of how the continuing clamour of the past acts as a help, not a ...”

“... should all these babies pick on me?’ she wonders. After her son – Sandro in the novel, Julian in real life – was born Comyns terminated her next pregnancy. Abortion was still illegal and expensive. She and John begged the money from friends and, when there were complications, Comyns couldn’t go to hospital ‘because we would have all gone to ...”

“... only disability is that idealism must fail in the end: the world refuses to be transformed. In ‘Julian and Maddalo’ Shelley deals with his misgiving by giving it a separate hearing. Keach aptly refers to ‘Julian’s belief in the power of mind to dissolve and transform all impediments to ideal self-realisation, and ...”

“... a false narrative, a doorstep is smeared with shit, a dead cat is found hanging from the bell-pull, the words assassins and a mort are daubed on the shop’s blind. The police are only half-helpful: as one investigating officer says to another, ‘It smells of Kraut in here.’ The Krulls decide – not inaccurately – that Hans is the bringer, or ...”

“... distinguished by the most alliterative opening sentences I have ever read’. (‘Boom! went the bell of St Botolph’s, bidding her boys from book and board. Clang! came the curfew of Carfax, calling the citizens from counter and cloth-yard.’) From time to time Bernard would show up in Sussex and bark orders in ‘his military voice’ – he had others ...”

“... He follows the ploughmen, throwing clods of earth at the crows; he minds turkeys and does a little bell-ringing. Flaubert awards such activities a paragraph, and then summarises the consequences of this pre-adolescent life in two short sentences which he pointedly sets out as a separate paragraph: ‘Aussi poussa-t-il comme un chêne. Il acquit de fortes ...”

“... step is the genome editing of human embryos. As the geneticist Peter Visscher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu put it earlier this year in an article for Nature, genome editing has the potential to create ‘human phenotypes that have never been previously observed’. Stephen Hsu, founder of the embryo screening company Genomic Prediction, believes that ...”

“... on equal terms. So, too, with the slightly more ambiguously gendered Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. As in surgery, literary sex change is an ugly operation and female chauvinists must rejoice to see a complete turn of the wheel in those areas of fiction where the practice is still necessary. When the Texan six-footer Tom Huff wished to make it big with a ...”

“... them with contempt.’ Here was the recruiting ground for the shock-troops of Thatcherism. Tim Bell, an advertising man who came up in this elevator, had rejected higher education because ‘the students were all blokes in duffel coats, listening to trad jazz and being irritating.’ It was a decision he never regretted. ‘The universities sidelined ...”

“... and rather frightening when people ignore, or don’t understand, jokes made at their expense. Julian Barnes once wrote a salutary essay on this, recalling the great Monty Python sketch about an obscure island completely inhabited by men sounding and looking like Alan Whicker. They paced to and fro, droning horribly and trailing microphones. It was, as ...”

“... to the ‘Picture Palace’ in her diaries and wrote an essay on ‘The Cinema’ in 1926. Clive Bell wrote two articles on cinema in the 1920s; the Hogarth Press published two pamphlets on film by the music critic Eric Walter White; and Roger Fry, in ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ (1909), mentioned that it was only when he watched a ‘cinematograph’ that ...”