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“... or rather his first published novel (he’d already had two rejected). On the back of it, however, William Heinemann offered Greene a three-book contract that was lucrative enough for him to leave his job as a subeditor at the Times. The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931) weren’t up to much, and it wasn’t till Stamboul Train (1932) that ...”

“... the ready – but sadly without foundation: at the first modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, William Hoyt of the USA claimed the gold medal for clearing 10'10"; and he didn’t have to carry any heavy weaponry. Even the crackest pole-vault assault squad, attacking a fortification with defences higher than 12 feet, would have knocked themselves out on the ...”

“... of ‘nova’. Suddenly she seemed to have read a lot of books. She refers to Joseph Conrad, William Golding’s Pincher Martin and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Morvern’s palette has expanded to encompass the Updikean spectrum of emerald, cyan and tangerine. She uses the word ‘whorls’. That this was Alan Warner’s voice rather than Morvern ...”

“... with strong smells tended to breed acceptance or even dependence. The Elizabethan entomologist Thomas Muffet (now remembered only for his daughter’s encounter with a spider) told the story of a man who used to clean privies entering an apothecary’s shop in Antwerp. He smelled the spices and promptly fainted. Fortunately, a bystander rushed ...”

“... of members of the extended Howard family painted in the 1610s by the Jacobean portraitist William Larkin (c.1580-1619). These imposing, larger-than-life images are a riot of texture, pattern and colour, with little or no regard for linear perspective. Before the middle decades of the 20th century, when, thanks to the pioneering scholarship of James ...”

“... cans of Diet Coke.The LRB has received a sheet of puffs for The Chief, David Nasaw’s Life of William Randolph Hearst (Gibson Square, £9.99), including one from Conrad Black in the Scotsman. That would be the same Conrad Black who wrote the book’s foreword. A helpful yellow post-it note reads: ‘FYI Conrad Black in the news’. Indeed he is; but I ...”

“... millionaire’, and closed in 1999. The only prize-winner to fess up to having donated was William Shockley, who invented the transistor. He also thought people with an IQ of less than 100 should be paid to undergo voluntary sterilisation. The Repository resulted in two hundred children. The original idea was that only women with an IQ of 120 or more ...”

“... written a mere fifty years later, and has just been adapted for the cinematograph and directed by William Marsh. It’s due for release in January 2001. The film-makers encountered various difficulties along the way, not least raising money, though location was apparently a problem, too. As Richard Holmes, one of the producers and nothing so far as I know to ...”

“... her husband’s money. In that ambition she seems to have been mostly successful. James, Rodin, Thomas Beecham, Edith Wharton, Sargent were among her many fans and beneficiaries. In August 1911, James wrote to Alice, his sister-in-law, and explained why he was at Hunter’s house. ‘I am adding day to day here, as you see – partly because it helps to ...”

“... the next £20 note, he didn’t mention that Turner was a stock holder in the the Bank of England. Thomas Rowlandson was once a rake; in The Chamber of Genius he depicts a dishevelled artist at work at his easel in a chaotic room that is home to a wife, two children and their dog. Rowlandson died a rich man – it took Sotheby’s three days to sell all his ...”

“... Caroline may have been another. It’s possible that her father was the playwright and politician Thomas Brinsley Sheridan. Such parentage would be far more in accordance with Caroline’s character and behaviour than that of her official father. Douglass finds the balance of evidence against it, yet it remains an attractive possibility. Caroline had an ...”

“... Arcadia. Shakespeare complete. Raleigh’s History of the World. Bacon complete. The Bible. Sir Thomas Browne complete. Milton, including the prose works. Cowley, Waller and Denham. Dryden, including the prose works and the translations. Samuel Butler complete. Pope complete, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. Addison complete. Steele complete. Swift ...”

“... microbial strain.’ One of the British soldiers who survived the cholera outbreak in India was Thomas Medwin, Shelley’s cousin. After returning to Europe, he joined the Shelley circle in Pisa in 1820. ‘They could not have imagined the geophysical teleconnections between the wet, stormy summer of 1816 they had spent together in Geneva and the chilling ...”

“... poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he.’ This assertion by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe in November 1647 seems almost a cliché, as much part of the democratic history of England as the Magna Carta or the Tolpuddle Martyrs or Paine’s Rights of Man. Yet for two and a half centuries after Rainborowe said his piece, no one knew ...”

“... of a family and it is not about the Godwins and the Shelleys. Perhaps the publishers persuaded William St Clair against his better judgment to downgrade his hero in the title and to include the Shelleys, who are more famous. This rich, glorious book is, however, a biography of William Godwin – no more, no less. St ...”