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“... 21 he moved to London to continue his medical studies as anatomical assistant to John Hunter at St George’s Hospital. Although Jenner returned to his Berkeley medical practice in 1773, Hunter had recognised Jenner’s scientific prowess and encouraged him in his research. ‘Why think – why not try the experiment,’ he wrote in 1775. Hunter’s patronage ...”

“... system, and where all investment and most of management time and effort are devoted to finding and stocking goods that will be useful in barter exchange – everything from aero-engines to potatoes. But there is no evidence that moderate rates of inflation are damaging. Or rather, there are a few conflicting pieces of evidence, none of them individually ...”

“... woman. She has grown up sturdy and unconventional, with a confidence partly learned from a blue-stocking mother, a friend of George Eliot, and partly developed in her solitary childhood. Orphaned at 18, she sets out for Sydney, and uses half her parents’ fortune to buy a glass factory. Unladylike, childishly impatient ...”

“... sense of smell and such a morbid dislike of noise that she came down to breakfast one morning in stocking feet having thrown her boots out of the window at a nightingale. At seven she had a Ruskinesque vision of primroses in a wood – a vision, she recalled, which ‘sank deep into the childish heart’. With so much of her character and talent established ...”

“... their best and nastiest to try and stop her. ‘Too much faith and too few years,’ droned Sir George Dyson, Director of the Royal College of Music. ‘It would be a pity to ruin your reputation so early,’ threatened the sinister Dr Sydney Northcote, Director of the Carnegie Trust, ‘we’ll leave you to think about it’ – and he locked Railton in a ...”

“... Medici Venus was admired, as the Cnidian statue had been, in alarming ways. The bibliophile Henry George Quin, for instance, records in his diary (extracts of which were published in an amusing article by Arthur Rau in the Book Collector in 1964) how, in the winter of 1785, he ‘stole’ into the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence when no one was there and ...”

“... born on its outskirts in 1932 – provided the background to her early books. But in the view of George Melly, also from the city, it left her and her prose with something more fundamental: a specific flavour. As a jolly man who loved to sing the blues, Melly, not quoted here, was in a good position to assess a particular Liverpudlian trait: that of ...”

“... Billy Bunter’s friend Cherry, or Jennings and Darbishire – tongues out, pencils poised, after stocking up in the tuck shop. If it is an attempt to repackage difficult Marx in popular language, Wheen’s timing is out by several decades. It is very bizarre to read that young Karl pestered his otherwise neglected mother by trying ‘to wheedle money out of ...”

“... turn up at auctions, and fetch good prices too, chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and died of his own hand, poor Sean ...”

“... Cuneiform studies have come far since 1872, when George Smith, assistant keeper in the Oriental Department of the British Museum, engrossed the December meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology with a paper on ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge’. Among the tablets recovered from Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh he had found an account of a world-wide flood which resembled the narrative of Genesis not only in its main outline but even in detail ...”

“... to the Virginian-Pilot, the local newspaper, though there is no law preventing Blackwater stocking as many as it wants). There are also the 21st-century equivalent of barracks (convention-style hotel rooms), an office block in which the door handles are fashioned from machine-gun barrels, and a memorial rock garden to the 25 Blackwater employees and ...”

“... her, including his grandmother Tanty, who quickly makes her mark by convincing a grocer stocking Caribbean goods that he should offer credit, as is customary in the Caribbean.Henry Oliver, the man Moses is expecting, eventually arrives without cigarettes, rum or money, having gambled most of it away on the ship; he is wearing only a light suit and a ...”

“... winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that ...”

“... of a royal house guest, the stage-struck Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the younger brother of George III. It seems that Foote, in his cocksure way, had been boasting his prowess as a horseman. As some kind of test or wager he was given one of the duke’s most ‘mettlesome’ stallions to ride. At the first touch of the spur the horse reared ...”

“... series of unseasonal scenes includes three children discovering Father strangled with a Christmas stocking. Gorey was, however, fond of his cousins, Elizabeth and Eleanor Garvey, and cousinship was perhaps the degree of separation he found most palatable. Cousins often feature in his stories and tend to come off better than parents or siblings. The ...”