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“... Macleod, who was off fishing in Scotland during the crucial experiments, did.) Or penicillin. Anne Miller, the first patient to be saved by the antibiotic, died on 27 May this year at the age of 90. Her hospital chart from 1942, showing the dramatic break in her life-threatening fever, is preserved in the Smithsonian. Insofar as medicine heals, it started ...”

“... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... too slow and polite to speak up … the couple are coming to supper this week.’ The couple was David and Assia Wevill. In September they moved and began furnishing their fourth home in as many years. It turned cold, another record-breaking winter, and it was months until they could afford carpets. ‘I am dying for a Bendix!’ Sylvia wrote to her ...”

“... of salvation. He had concocted a bizarre and idiosyncratic theology, rather like the wonderful Miller in The Cheese and the Worms, but in his case it was marshland, and particularly the reeds, which played the central part. The reed is one of the symbols of the Passion, for, on the Cross, Christ had been tendered a vinegar-soaked sponge on the end of a ...”

“... stage, I had been dragged in as a possible editor of this thing.I know they wanted to get Karl Miller at one point.But Karl had recommended me and for Karl’s sake I agreed to talk. It was thought I knew how to start magazines.Irony.Anyway, by then I’d been at the TLS, so I did know more about it than they did. I drew up endless documents about how this ...”