“... depends. The jewel in the crown of gene theory, however, came in 1953, when, with the help of X-ray photographs taken by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, Watson and Crick elucidated the three-dimensional structure of DNA. The DNA-based paradigm of heredity with its accompanying ‘genespeak’ was strengthened by experimental studies employing a wide ...”

“... within hearing of the traffic of the Strand’. At 3 a.m. every day from that same decade, William Henry Smith (note the initials) at 186 Strand took delivery of ‘raw [news]papers’ from Fleet Street, wrapped them in twine – he got through a hundred miles of the stuff each week – and loaded them onto carts for delivery to the railways. The ...”

“... was to her sisters. In her adolescence, she adopted a West Point haircut and signed her letters ‘William Cather, MD’. She graduated valedictorian (out of a class of three) at the age of sixteen and attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she met the folklorist and linguist Louise Pound. She later taught high-school English and wrote for ...”

“... with Sweets Edison, Stuff Smith and Juan Tizol), Ralph Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys, Ray Charles. And towards the end of the day, with the setting sun doing something wonderful with the sandstone in the precincts of Lake Powell, we had a medley that included Clarence Williams (‘You’re Bound to Look Like a Monkey When You Get Old’), Van ...”

“... and runs riot; and there is also a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy.’ According to William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, in his Essays on Russian Novelists (1911), ‘your true Russian’ is notable for humility, love of theory, paralysis of the will, and a complete lack of ‘the healthy moderation of the Anglo-Saxon’. What, Phelps asks, is the ...”

“... on ships. This chapter supersedes all other discussions of the subject in English, and Ray Page, on letters runic and poetic, offers a remarkable example of how an expert can demonstrate the general interest of a very technical topic without sacrifice of scholarly integrity. The Northern World hardly succeeds in its professed purpose, ‘to examine ...”

“... that he had met the Shekinah (a manifestation of divinity) in the form of a Venetian woman whose X-ray vision allowed her to look into the Earth’s core and see Satan. For this he was officially declared insane (but not a heretic) by the Inquisition in Venice. He spent much of his tenure as the Collège de France’s first professor of Arabic comfortably ...”

“... all, had never been to Florence or Siena or Paris, never studied art history. At lunch break at William Anglis’s wholesale butchery, I read Burckhardt. I also read Vasari and saw him patronise Uccello, the prick. Poor Paolo, Vasari wrote, he was commissioned to do a work with a chameleon. Not knowing what a chameleon was, he painted a camel ...”

“... today is in keeping with a longer history of manipulation. After visiting the studio, Man Ray reported that he was ‘more impressed than in any cathedral. I was overwhelmed by its whiteness and lightness … [It] was like entering another world.’ Brancusi did everything he could to maintain this atmosphere, dressing all in white, sporting a white ...”

“... go out much. Place is unimportant. It’s where you live, no more than that: a stopover. How did William Burroughs finish up in a clapboard cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, with his brood of sleek, well-fed felines? The old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second ...”

“... favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and French intellectuals flocked there, and to the larger shop on rue de l’Odéon, where it moved in 1922. ‘From that moment on,’ Beach said, ‘for over twenty years, they ...”

“... things for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and ...”

“... was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died in Spain a few months before Bell. It is the product of a more decorous school of biography: they didn’t seek out information that people weren’t ...”

“... Editors like Ricks allow us to appreciate how nothing in poetic creation is given. Like the x-ray pictures of paintings, they reveal the hidden outlines of earlier texts – sometimes the existence of a different painting altogether. What are we to make of such information? How is it to affect our reading? Add the questions of biographical and critical ...”

“... In his heyday, from the late Forties to around the start of William Glock’s regime at the Third Programme (afterwards Radio Three), Hans Keller’s vehement presence was a force for the good in English musical life. He represented at a high level old-style modern values – not exactly cosmopolitan (an important reservation to which I shall return) but emphatically not insular ...”