“... juxtaposition between a dying woman and her undying cells, and retells the fable. Rebecca Skloot may be just the latest in a long line, but The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will surely stand as the definitive account. There’s no simple moral to the tale, but the book shows how even the best intentions may be warped ...”

“... range of hearing that is present in otherwise normally functioning ears. People with hyperacusis may find that certain sounds are more difficult to listen to than others, and some sounds may cause pain in the ears, even when those sounds don’t bother others. Often, the most disturbing or painful sounds can be sudden ...”

“... Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs matter here. By the time he arrived on the island in the 1550s the French privateer François Le Clerc had lost one of his in a naval battle with the British off Guernsey and contrived a wooden replacement: Jambe de Bois, as ...”

“... made to that end by John Foxe. ‘With these books at your elbow,’ Donne suggests, ‘you may in almost every branch of knowledge suddenly emerge as an authority.’ How do we talk about imaginary books? What kind of existence do they have? In Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (1998), Anne Lake Prescott calls his fictive titles ...”

“... commission that this year flat feet or short sight is no longer a legal excuse – which may be the truth and may be an attempt to extract another bribe. If you’re at university you can avoid military service (or take part in tame drills at the faculty instead): there is no greater incentive for young men to ...”

“... Sejanus is the ‘evisceration of individuality’. The techniques that van Es evokes so vividly may not have been quite so exclusively Shakespearean as he would like us to believe: plays by later rivals, notably Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, seem to have learned from Shakespeare’s example even if their ...”

“... curated a MoMA retrospective of his work in 1947, was Mies’s most vocal American champion and may have played a role in Lambert’s decision to give him the commission. Mies invited Johnson to collaborate with him on the building, which was twice as high as anything he had built before, giving him special responsibility for the interiors.Having won her ...”

“... Hollywood’s ‘gigantic Jewish capitalistic propaganda’. Confessions of a Nazi Spy opened on 6 May 1939 to predictable controversy. The Legion of Decency, which had defended Riefenstahl during her visit, claimed the movie wasn’t so much anti-Nazi as pro-communist, while the powerful ‘radio priest’ Father Coughlin described the Warner brothers and ...”

“... first its benefits to health and public speaking. To judge from one of his surviving books, Byrd may have been at home in the barbarously archaic Norman-French of the Tudor law courts, which he certainly exploited with enthusiasm in perennial litigation, as any self-respecting Elizabethan gentleman would. It is symbolic of a certain insularity in Byrd that ...”

“... Ischia, Lenù writes letter after letter to Lila, and gets only one back, at the end of August. It may as well be the platonic letter. ‘The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I ...”

“... of hordes of extras in 1930s costumes, period cars and trucks. One signal of a turning point may have been Khrzhanovsky’s construction in 2008 of a full-size partial replica of а giant Soviet passenger plane, the Kalinin K-7, at Kharkiv airport. In the real world a prototype of the seven-engined, double-tailed behemoth was built in Kharkiv in 1933 and ...”

“... has given organisational form to a new European left-wing populism. In the European elections of May 2014, with a tiny, crowd-funded budget and just four months of existence, it gained 1.2 million votes and five MEPs. By the end of the year it led the two establishment parties in the polls. The roots of Podemos lie in the huge 2011 indignados protests ...”

“... subservient lot’, he told David Marquand years later – with his conversion to socialism. That may have already been underway but would be shaped by his work teaching in the industrial north.His quarrel with Oxford in a sense drove him there. In 1905, Tawney joined the newly formed Workers’ Educational Association and moved quickly onto its ...”

“... without returning for her. He explains that he’s only doing his job: Occasionally a couple may be permitted to cross to the island together, but this is rare. It requires an unusually strong bond of love between them. It does sometimes occur, I don’t deny, and that’s why when we find a man and wife, or even unmarried lovers, waiting to be carried ...”

“... a war whose technology was even more impersonally brutal than his own military prowess. There you may still look down on the face of one of the earliest military tomb effigies in Europe. If we are familiar with the medieval monuments which now jostle each other in churches, we tend to forget how startling and novel this figure of a recumbent knight would have ...”