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“... of the origins of Spanish flu point to birds as the source of the pandemic: the French virologist Claude Hannoun found a hundred different strains of flu in the birds of the Somme estuary; in China, flocks of ducks are traditionally herded through paddy fields to eat insects, and mingle there with wild birds; the evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey ...”

“... of his own peregrinations from the ‘pretty, smart, thrillingly cool’ twentysomething Marie-Claude Podopoulos, the daughter of an eminent cardiologist; she is intrigued. ‘So, my darling, what are you up to?’ There is a simple answer, involving an exhibition opening that turned out to have been postponed, a case of wine that needed to be ...”

“... Oblivion to restore it to our notice. Or we might miss the homiletic point of pictures showing St Francis embracing the Christ child, or the dead Jesus, and have to be told that it ‘calls on each one of us to embrace the incarnate Christ’. It is true that the explanations of the experts often make the pictures more interesting without diverting our ...”

“... a story – powerful cults, saturated with negativity – they might not behave themselves. As Claude Lévi-Strauss understood, every version of a myth, however distant or apparently contradictory, belongs to the myth; every retelling is owned by the story, not by the teller. Freud’s Oedipus isn’t just Freud talking about Oedipus, but one more ...”

“... Vanderborcht, John Vander-heydon, Adrian Van-Diest, Sir Anthony Vandyck, William Vander-velde, Francis Vanzoon, Herman Verelst and F. de Vorsterman, and with a little more diligence he could easily have doubled this collection of foreign Englishmen. Of the 106 painters accorded a biographical sketch by Buckeridge, 55 were immigrants or visitors to ...”

“... joke) with a medallion of the Queen hanging round his neck and positioned over his heart. Philip Francis told Burke the account was ‘pure foppery’. Jefferson said the real-life queen bore little resemblance to ‘the rhapsodies of Burke’. They might or might not have agreed with recent commentators who see Marie Antoinette’s nakedness, like that of ...”

“... he has never seen any Place that affords a Subject equal to the poorest imitations of Gaspar or Claude. Paul Sanby is the only Man of Genius, he believes, who has employ’d his Pencil that Way – Mr G hopes Lord Hardwicke will not mistake his meaning, but if his Lordship wishes to have any thing tolerable of the name of G. the Subject altogether as well ...”

“... In the spring of 2008, shortly after he started reading Infinite Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I’d said it was, one of the greatest literary works of all time; b) but when he got to the ending – 981 pp. body copy, another 96 of small-print endnotes – did I think he was going to think it was worth it? No, I said, the ending’s infuriating, and although the author denied it and I haven’t made a study of the available papers, I still suspect it was to some extent an afterthought, a way of ducking out of a project that, without it, would maybe never have ended at all ...”

“... Majesty, still less tell her to knock it off. Instead, swallowing his pride, he went to see Sir Claude. In the little garden of his delightful 17th-century grace and favour cottage at Hampton Court Sir Claude Pollington was reading. Actually, he was meant to be reading, but he was dozing over a box of confidential ...”

“... book: his subtitle, which is in fact the series-title of a list of new literary biographies under Claude Rawson’s general editorship. If you want an uncritical biography, Sutherland might say, don’t buy this one but stick to Lockhart, or to some other modern academic biography (such as Edgar Johnson’s two volumes, 1970) which essentially accepts ...”

“... 1935 (at the height of the Depression) the cheque was for £42. 17s. 5d.’ A film starring Claude Rains ‘was a modest hit. The Invisible Man certainly brought in visible funds.’ An earlier biographer, Ritchie Calder, has asserted that Wells, although always capable of warmth in his private relationships, particularly with the young, gained a ...”

“... and Robert Byron. The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have a sufficiently resourceful mind, and a persuasive style, of course, you can stimulate them by going for a walk ...”

“... aristocrats and radicals. Jane Austen, for instance, enjoys no more prominence than her brothers Francis and Charles, both officers in the navy. While Uglow devotes considerable attention to campaigns on sea and land, her primary concern is the rhythm of life on the home front during twenty years of war. The wars became like the vicissitudes of British ...”

“... of Marx’s many targets. And Kelly writes in interesting detail about the influence on Herzen of Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin. But the passion – and torment – that drove Herzen flashes only intermittently in her book. Kelly quotes Tolstoy saying that ‘Herzen awaits his readers in the future. Far above the heads of the present crowd, he transmits ...”

“... the grounds of the Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, where he was staying at the invitation of Francis I. (Da Vinci had brought three masterpieces with him, including the Mona Lisa.) Braudel also describes the tumultuous life of the Baroque poet Giambattista Marino, compelled to leave his native city of Naples in dramatic circumstances (he had helped his ...”