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“... the efficacity of churchmen’s offices, or expressed a wish that his family should bequeath more money or land to continue the monastic task of intercession. The French title of this book was simply Les Revenants, and ‘revenant’ catches better than ‘ghost’ the author’s view that the commemoration of the dead, in Christian ritual, seeks to ...”

“... the time I was composing a long, complicated spy story called Manhunt, and to make the title look more official on the front of the exercise book in which I was writing it, I added the two letters at the end of the word, in tiny block capitals, subscript. Manhunt by itself looked a bit feeble, but ManhuntAA looked incredibly cool. Yes, it was a book I was ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... and later his third wife’. As a septuagenarian in 1974, Yourcenar noted that she was more than twice as old as Fernande had been in 1903, and that she could ‘look at her as at a daughter whom I am trying my best to understand’. Set against this passage is a reproduction of Fernande’s souvenir pieux – ‘a small religious card that could ...”

“... safely on the other side. Apparently Spartan virtue wasn’t dead yet.In the ghost stories of M.R. James, antiquarians are drier than dust: it takes an attack by a centuries-old ghoul to make them break out in a spot of mild tut-tuttery. In reality, they were volatile creatures. A visit to any ancient site but especially Rome – perhaps the greatest mass of ...”

“... pretty well. He was ‘one of the twelve’, the inner circle of followers or disciples of Jesus. More particularly, he was the disciple who questioned the truth of Jesus’s resurrection. In John 20, the only gospel source for the story, he demands to see and touch the physical evidence of crucifixion – ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the ...”

“... the celebrated ‘St Michan’s mummies’, 60 years ago, I already knew of the church from M.R. James, whose tales of supernatural terror entirely possessed my nine-year-old imagination. We entered the crypt, and it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or ...”

“... brains. One is implied directly: start at the beginning of life itself, tracing the appearance of more and more complex living creatures, some of which develop organs that better and better perform brain-like functions. This evolutionary story allows us to begin to understand the constraints governing the structure of ...”

“... to drugs, but to exercise, clean living, and cheerfulness.’ Drugs, anyone? Nothing could seem more absolutely consigned to history than the combination of a strong pair of legs and a healthy cast of mind that so powerfully appealed to the late Victorian intelligentsia. ‘He was all wire and whipcord,’ one of Meredith’s contemporaries recorded, ‘and ...”