“... 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 ...”

“... in Europe, at different times the friend of Byron, Foscolo and Canova.’ In this manner, Francis Haskell begins the third of his selected essays, written over the last twenty years and brought together in this volume. It is a manner which seems to parody, in its relentless accumulation of the circumstantial, a lost genre of writing, the late ...”

“... Austrian Jewish doctor and her mother a French Catholic. She studied under Arnold Schoenberg as a young pianist and singer. ‘If ever in my life I had one teacher and one great influence,’ she said, ‘it was Schoenberg.’ After her father’s death from cancer, in 1926 the family moved to Paris. By the early 1930s she had abandoned music in favour of ...”

“... virility. The artist as gentleman, the artist as courtier, the artist as thinker, the artist as a young man or woman, the artist as artist and handsome figure: these are some of the varieties of representation of the artist from the Reformation and Renaissance to, say, David Hockney. Van Dyck made numerous self-portraits. His friend Rubens’s picture of him ...”

“... of a far more illustrious progeny), going on to J.R. Cozens (who went mad) and Girtin (who died young), and eventually reaching a triumphant climax with the work of J.M.W. Turner. The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, on view at the Royal Academy until 12 April, sets out to recycle this rather tired old story in a manner that remains remarkably ...”

“... bats and wolves and the night, he carries the imagery of rabies and syphilis into the age of Aids. Francis Ford Coppola’s lavish, stylish, sometimes silly, always engaging movie also includes the lines quoted above, but we hardly notice them because we’ve just been treated to a much more spectacular encounter between worlds. The year is ...”

“... Hayman) over those from the Beauvoir biographies (Deirdre Bair – very much the best; Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Margaret Crosland). Check those against the crucial four volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs, those translated as The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, All Said and Done and Adieux: A farewell to Sartre. Crosscheck against the ...”

“... service with the 93rd Infantry Regiment. I had been called up for 12 months, but like many young Frenchmen of that unlucky generation, I was kept in the Army nearly two and a half years owing to unforeseen ‘events’ in North Africa. We weren’t old enough to have joined either the Free French in Britain or the Resistance against the Nazis in ...”

“... on to modern Iraq. ‘Views of Rome: The Colosseum’ by Piranesi (1760-78) ‘Netley Abbey’ by Francis Towne (1809) ‘Netley Abbey’ by Samuel Prout (date unknown) ‘Equivalents for the Megaliths’ by Paul Nash (1935) ‘The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum’ by John Martin (1822) ‘Sketch for Hadleigh Castle’ by John Constable ...”

“... before. In The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition, Francis Haskell, who was chairman of the advisory committee for this show, describes how Old Master ex-hibitions began as more or less random displays of available pictures and only later became more scholarly. Their origins were varied: auction sales in London ...”

“... dean of the seminary, although he still hovered darkly in corridors. The new dean, Dr Ledwith, was young and friendly and open and very good-looking. He was also reputed to be really smart. One of my friends knew him from home so he often stopped to talk to us. He was a new breed of priest; he had studied in Europe and America. Many of the teaching priests ...”

“... the gendarmes should shoot all landscape painters. Perhaps he saw in Miss Murray something of the young dancer, her skip a precursor to ballet steps. Or perhaps it was the theme of childhood; both Degas and Manet were making transcriptions of Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita at the time. Or it may be symptomatic of the French interest in the English ...”

“... Dr Paul-Michel Foucault, a wealthy and conservative surgeon, is deeply irritated by his young son’s evident disinclination to follow him into medicine and apparently infuriated by his effete strain of bookishness. He decides to toughen the boy up by introducing him to the bracing and heroic virilities a surgeon habitually displays ...”