“... the Whitney, with a note stating: ‘Since I took the trouble of having a photostat made of it, it may indicate that I am not so modest as I am said to be.’ Writing to Flexner himself, Hopper dismissed the interpretation and told the astonished critic that the painting depicted ‘a tuberculosis sanatorium’. The Hoppers had read The Magic Mountain with ...”

“... binding – but was paid off with £12,000 and died not long afterwards in Bengal. At first, Mary may have consented to her cloistering: she was pregnant by another man, and in order to secure the child’s legitimacy would have to pretend that it had been conceived later than it had been. The baby was hidden for three months, then presented at its baptism as ...”

“... entangled (Partridge’s text is addressed not only to ‘Good Huswives’ but also to Richard Wistow, assistant to the Company of Barbers and Surgeons). According to Galenic humoural theory, health was a matter of balancing the black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm that swam through the body, and food was a crucial means of establishing this ...”

“... man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a repressed homosexual. But what that actually means isn’t straightforward. In her essay in the Cambridge Companion, Heike Bauer writes that it was only in Stoker’s day that the boundaries of ...”

“... and endorsed by James’s fellow contributors. Among the other pieces in the first number were Richard Le Gallienne’s torrid, gothic poem ‘Tree-Worship’ (‘With loving cheek pressed close against thy horny breast,/I hear the roar of sap’); Max Beerbohm’s ‘Defence of Cosmetics’ (‘Artifice must queen it once more in the town … If men are ...”

“... to accommodate genes and mutations, recent work has been more challenging. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, for example, used the spandrels of St Mark’s in Venice, which exist as a necessary by-product of the process of mounting a dome on rounded arches, as a way of illustrating the anti-adaptationist idea that certain features of organisms have ...”

“... state is treating stupidity not as an evil but as a valuable commodity, the production of which may be encouraged in order to increase revenue, as though stupidity were a good in its own right. There is no attempt here, as there is in the case of cigarettes, to balance the amount of money raised against the merits of the behaviour which allows the money to ...”

“... a simple visceral response to a preserved penis in a jar, then we should have talked because there may have been room for manoeuvre. Who knows, if the contents of the preserving-jar had been shrouded in murky liquid, its contents only to be glimpsed and guessed at, if it had been seen, once Maisie had broken the jar open, as undifferentiated grey tissue on ...”

“... that Shakespeare was trapped into marriage with Anne Hathaway and then cuckolded by his brother Richard. Hence the queen in Hamlet, adulterous with her brother-in-law, while Shakespeare plays the ghost; and hence Richard III, where sly Dick seduces Lady Anne. Perhaps the Joycean influence became unhelpful ...”

“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... to the Turks, who were often denounced for degeneracy – swords, slippers and sexual excess, as Richard Cobden put it – the Arabs were often admired for manly simplicity. David Urquhart, secretary at the embassy in Constantinople, wrote that Islam was not a false religion to be ridiculed: it taught no new dogmas, propounded no fanciful revelation and ...”

“... the group included Stephen Cambone, Lawrence Di Rita, William Luti and, on a part-time basis, Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Policy Board. Several of them had had a hand in rebuilding the armed forces, kicking the Vietnam syndrome, and winning the Cold War in the 1980s in the service of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. They had, in their own ...”

“... surpassed Britain’s by the early 20th century, the City remained the financial centre: ‘It may be that hides and rabbit skins are being sold from Australia to New York,’ one merchant banker wrote in 1914, ‘or coffee from Brazil to Hamburg, or eggs and butter from Siberia to London, or herrings from Aberdeen to Russia, or machinery from England to ...”

“... the Trevelyan Lectures which he delivered at Cambridge in 1995 on the early Jacobean Parliaments. Richard Cust and Andrew Thrush calculate from internal evidence that the text now edited by them was written in the late 1990s. An expanded version of the lectures, now incorporating several additional chapters, King James VI and I and His English Parliaments ...”

“... is the second big virtue of the book, to match its anecdotal interest. (The selection was made by Richard Stott, who sadly died on 30 July; I suspect it is he who should get the credit for shaping the story.) It is the account of how Blair fell in love with his own certainty and sense of conviction. In Campbell’s early years working with him there are three ...”