What's Bred in the Bone is the second novel in the Canadian writer Robertson Davies' Cornish Trilogy.

[1][2] It is the life story of Francis or Frank Cornish, whose death and will were the starting point for the first novel, The Rebel Angels.

The main part of the book is that life as narrated by the Recording Angel, interspersed with comments in which the daimon explains how he worked to make Cornish a great man.

We follow Cornish's life from his two Canadian grandparents – part of "what's bred in the bone" – through his childhood as a wealthy and precocious misfit in a small Ontario town, his education in Toronto and Oxford, his unusual apprenticeship as a restorer and painter in Nazi Germany, his wartime experiences in England, his postwar work with a group resembling the Monuments Men, and his collecting and patronage of the arts in Toronto.

It is also connected to earlier novels; when Cornish is at school in Toronto, one of his teachers is Dunstan Ramsay from the Deptford Trilogy.