“... entertaining inventors, pretenders, dreamers and other rascals. Take the two enterprising brothers Francis and George Moult. In the early 1690s, Nehemiah Grew invented a means of deriving salt from the ‘spa waters bubbling up in the outskirts of London’, long known to have healing properties, and set up a factory for the production of what came to be known ...”

“... zone where the techniques of fiction and non-fiction intermingle outside the ambit of the novel. Francis Spufford is an almost parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar exploration (I May Be Some Time, 1996), a memoir of childhood reading (The Child that Books Built, 2002), a study of various unsung successes of postwar ...”

“... between Ackerley and his sister: about that only, since Nancy is granted no independent life. (Francis King does his best to supply her with one in his accommodating introduction.) Given that Ackerley could unquestionably write, his perverse refusal to make real the husband of Nancy, or her son, has to be evidence that it was his own flesh only that he ...”

“... in Elizabethan London. (Those making a film of this book will want to know that.) The conspirator Francis Throckmorton was on the rack in the Tower, and Elizabeth, to the alarm of her ministers, would have tortured de Castelnau too, if she had had the power to do so, or at least have sent him packing, which is what she did to Mendoza, the Spanish ...”

“... had an urge to repudiate his audience.Mann is at his best recounting the speed with which the young Brando went from the New School to playing Stanley Kowalski. His progress was spurred by two people. Stella Adler was an actress and a dynamic teacher of acting. She fell for Brando and his chronic originality. Her approach had two anchors: respect the text ...”

“... Enjoy your apotheosis. The constellation of white explorers said to have been hailed as gods – Francis Drake, Hernán Cortés, Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, to name a few – acquired a new star in the mid-1970s, when Prince Philip vacationed off the coast of Tanna, in what was then the New Hebrides, aboard HMY Britannia. Ever since, a string of ...”

“... building, or we must build industrial buildings’ (his italics).The Chartered Accountants were a young professional organisation when, in 1888, they commissioned John Belcher to design their Institute on a site behind Moorgate. It is bordered by narrow streets – Great Swan Alley and Moorgate Place. The architect and the sculptor he commissioned, Hamo ...”

“... to migrate back and forth across an ever-expanding city. Over the centuries cheapness drew the young and ill-fed members of the troop to Soho and Fitzrovia; scenery as well as low rents directed them to Hampstead and Chelsea; in living memory square feet at knock-down prices tempted them to Hoxton (Creative Quarters identifies the studio furthest east ...”

“... political and military to examine all that was left of the material past. ‘Whatsoever,’ as Francis Bacon had put it, ‘singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced,’ old coins, flints, armour, pottery and bits of parchment, these were the antiquaries’ stock in trade. Gathered like anatomists around the society’s table they sifted ...”

“... with which to end an introduction to the English comic writers. But not everybody likes Rabelais. Young Calvin did. The later Calvin did not. Nor did the Council of Trent – where the French were a tiny minority. Rabelais’s Christian comedy was too much for Pius IV. His Index Tridentinus (1564) casts Rabelais among the ‘forbidden authors of the first ...”

“... state till a later pope resurrected it in 1814. It flourishes still, and among its members is Francis, the present pope, the first Jesuit to have held that office. Now a non-Jesuit historian has monumentalised the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be ...”

“... and painful divorce from her third husband, a rich man who had craftily gone to an aggressive young woman solicitor while Harriet was stuck with the stuffy old family firm, so that it looked as if she would emerge from the case with very little of his money. Her latest novel had just been published and was receiving patronisingly dismissive reviews; in it ...”

“... who used to read aloud to his girlfriends from Flaubert’s letters, and portrayed the writer Francis Wyndham with a battered but recognisable copy of the first volume of the Belknap edition in his fist, would have agreed. But having ‘no biography’ is impossible: the nearest you can get is to have no published biography in your own ...”

“... What John Horgan means by his teasing title, inspired evidently by Francis Fukuyama’s view of history, is not that scientists will run out of work worthy of all that trouble and expense, but that the great discoveries, on which the intellectual edifice rests, have carried us up to or beyond the point of diminishing returns ...”

“... expense? In Statistics in Britain D.A. MacKenzie has harnessed this theory to explain the work of Francis Galton (1822-1911), Karl Pearson (1857-1936) and R.A. Fisher (1890-1962): ‘I argue that eugenics did not merely motivate their statistical work but affected its content.’ That one’s family background and early experiences determine in large measure ...”