“... to the Spanish during the defence of Leiden in 1574. Next, Gascoigne sought to make his mark in the world and at Court by writing. In 1575 he composed an entertainment for the Queen on her visit to Kenilworth. What should have been his finest hour became a debacle: in his eagerness to please his patron the Earl of Leicester, who was paying for the ...”

“... and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a national cast in the Manifesto. From the Marquis de Sade through Baudelaire and Rimbaud to ...”

“... the world to rural Essex, a place with a long history of boat-building and Dionysiac boho revels: Francis Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of ...”

“... but they also remind us that ‘character’ means both personality, and, in its original sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an ...”

“... to him in the night on the bed and sucked him.’ She even searched his body for the devil’s mark when he was asleep. Convinced that her husband had murdered their son Samuel by witchcraft, in order to make her work longer hours, she had no inhibition about publicising her fears. Parsons did nothing to allay the mounting suspicion. Reluctant to settle a ...”

“... a true believer. All the same, like many who have written about Goya (notable examples are Francis Klingender in Goya in the Democratic Tradition and Fred Licht in Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art), Hughes argues that Goya is in some ways our contemporary; or that he was, at least, the first modern artist. Not unexpectedly, it is Goya as a ...”

“... Ritter blocked German translations of books by the émigré historians Hans Rosenberg and Francis Carsten in the Fifties). In the next two decades a formidable array of scholars showed how much the Prussian monarchy, landed nobility, army and bureaucracy had contributed to the disastrous course of modern German history. Their mordant view of the Old ...”

“... the growing thunder yearns/With hot swift pulses all the silence burns.’ In the last poem in Francis O’Gorman’s Oxford edition, ‘The Transvaal’ (1899), republican freedom is still under attack and Swinburne is still fuming: ‘Patience, long sick to death, is dead,’ it begins. ‘Too long/Have sloth and doubt and treason bidden us be/What ...”

“... I was wary of the trap that seemed ready to spring. I was ambitious, on my own account, to make a mark on the world. I didn’t want to carry someone else’s thwarted expectations. If I failed to make something of myself, wouldn’t I heap my frustration onto my daughter? And she, in the course of time, onto her daughter? When is it a woman’s turn, I ...”

“... and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures and washed in a river before being sent to the shearing men. If you ...”

“... level. This move ‘from mimesis to semiosis’ – from naive to sophisticated reading – is the mark of a genuinely ‘literary’ response. From there it is a matter of going on to recognise that details which lack ‘motivation’ in straightforward mimetic terms may take on a high charge of meaning as elements in the complex textual weave. This is what ...”

“... and Anne Boleyn’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. Arrests took place in the first week of May: of Mark Smeaton, a court musician, and a number of gentlemen close to the king. George Boleyn was one of them. Along with the queen, the suspects were sent to the Tower, and a trial process set in motion. In the end, five men, including George, were charged with ...”

“... 16th-century trainer Federico Grisone, the horse was ‘a thing of worth beyond any might and a mark of honour above all other marks’. Not only was it the most expensive domesticated animal kept at court, it was also essential to warfare. The designations cavaliere, chevalier and caballero in Italian, French and Spanish respectively identified nobility or ...”

“... be expected, at a period in American literary history when Sinclair Lewis had already made his mark. It would have been a shrewder move to present Bonds only in extracts, as Ida reads them to understand what Bevel wants from her (this is where the story proper gets going anyway), rather than starting the book with an uncontextualised slab of prose that ...”

“... be easier to read. One of Binns’s innumerable sidelights is his reminder of the existence of Sir Francis Kynaston’s translation of Chaucer, the Amorum Troili et Creseidae libri duo priores angli-co-latini, published with a facing-page text of Thynne, dedicated to the Royal Librarian, and beginning: Dolorem Troili duplicem narrare, ‘The double sorwe of ...”