“... a pale English rose: before dying, she stood ‘for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around’. The painter Charles William Mitchell was so excited by this vision that he portrayed Hypatia leaning naked against an altar: her left arm stretches upwards – perhaps illustrating pagan ...”

“... decided to build nuclear weapons in January 1947, and to set up British Camps X, W and Y. William Penney, who had worked at Los Alamos, was chosen to direct the Atomic Weapon Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, which was to be the British equivalent of Los Alamos and Arzamas-16; Capenhurst in Cheshire was chosen to house the uranium ...”

“... the ground was Bride Caskey, and Claffey was on top of her. He saw that Claffey’s buttocks were white, and meagre in form though energetic in action, and that the woman’s eyes were closed and that she was bleeding from her mouth. Her kerchief was pulled off her head and laid beside her, lifting in the wind; the merest inch was trapped beneath the boot of ...”

“... this awkward attack that Harsnett diverted attention back to the exorcisms conducted by the Jesuit William Weston at Denham and other places in 1585-6; various participants were tracked down to be interrogated, their depositions and a Book of Miracles kept by the priests forming the basis for Harsnett’s scornful treatise of 1603. Professor Walker makes ...”

“... warehouse building. H. said, ‘I hear it’s going to be very classy. I hear it’s going to have white rats.’ H. spoke about his former wife and toothbrushes: ‘She was always at it, fiercely, many hours a day and night.’Harrison spent his childhood on a ranch in northern California shooting rattlesnakes, his adolescence selling marijuana and then ...”

“... irrecoverable, knowing what he was like can sometimes seem irrelevant, if not indeed irreverent. William Wordsworth is reputed to have slit the uncut pages of new and expensive books with a breakfast knife sticky with jam, Immanuel Kant to have controlled his socks with sock suspenders operated from his top pockets: facts which would interest us decidedly ...”

“... movement shifted aesthetes’ attention away from great houses to country cottages, black and white farmhouses, and small manor houses like Kelmscott. The past celebrated by William Morris or C.R. Ashbee was one of homeliness, craftsmanship and simplicity. Its location was the cottage and the village green, not the ...”

“... 1869 Jemmy led a mob of Fuegians who attacked an Anglican congregation at Wulaia. The eight white worshippers were clubbed and stoned to death. In the belief-system of Jemmy’s tribe, ‘the outside world was Hell and its people no better than beasts. Perhaps, that November, Jemmy Button mistook the missionaries as envoys of the Power of ...”

“... Then he met J.L. Austin. In 1955, the Oxford philosopher came to Harvard to deliver the William James Lectures, later published as How to Do Things with Words. At the time, Austin was the pre-eminent representative of so-called ‘ordinary language philosophy’, a form of analysis focused not on logic, but rather on the everyday use of everyday ...”

“... Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such Anglocentric and Italocentric definitions, but only by ascribing even greater consistency and homogenising power ...”

“... good doctor, shining his penlight into her eyes to check her pupils, made note of beauty – ice white and blue mixed in the dead non-movement of her eyes; he thought of his 15-year-old daughter who still gave him hugs and seemed protected by his love, but he wasn’t a stupid man, and he knew the world, this world, this great country of his, could eat ...”

“... often blacked-up Jews and Irishmen who may have hoped to ingratiate themselves in this way with white society. Noses are of supreme importance. According to one phrenologist, ‘the nose alone . . . tells the story of its wearer’s rank and condition.’ In the view of one O.S. Fowler, acquisitiveness ‘is on each side of the middle portion of the nose ...”

“... to honour the poor and the departed, but we don’t have to be so humble and defeated about it. William Empson pointed out long ago the creepy quietism of the poem’s sentiment: it is ‘stated as pathetic’, he said, ‘but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it.’ Harrison repeatedly borrows the stanza form and rhyme ...”

“... she was sent, as if to complete the gothic theme, to the same awful convent school that Antonia White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a more ...”

“... infiltrations’ that the Oxford Textbook highlights were unknown to him. Eosinophils – white cells containing granules that are stained strongly by the red dye eosin – were not described until 1880. But the biggest difference between Bristowe’s allergies and those in the Oxford Textbook is not the modern understanding of the cells and chemicals ...”