“... it wrong most of the time.’ O’Connor’s best-known characters – Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, Francis Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away – are embodiments of that predicament or struggle. They wander in a wilderness of the spirit. They are in a constant and desperate search for grace. Here is Tarwater, towards the end of the novel:He remained ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... remembered misquotation’), he mentions his surprise at being compared to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponge by reviewers of his first two books. It’s easy to see how they got there: The Mezzanine – Howie’s footnote-strewn account of a morning at his anonymous corporate workplace, defamiliarised by intricate descriptions of vending machines and ...”

“... property developers, bent politicians and financial cowboys who made Fred Goodwin look like Francis of Assisi. The nation had screwed up again. Ireland is renowned for two industries: Guinness and Joyce. A good deal of the country’s labour over the years has been devoted to the task of generating fantasies and rendering the population ...”

“... who had hoped to take part in the climb, joined the search for the bodies. They never found Lord Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were ...”

“... being quite identical with itself. But the point cuts deeper than literature: we would not call a mark which could happen only once a sign. Language must belong to the Other – to my linguistic community as a whole – before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level indifferent to ...”

“... crit-iques of bioethics: intellectual arrogance and moral weakness. In Our Posthuman Future, Francis Fukuyama, though a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, accuses bioethicists of pandering to scientists, remarking that in any discussion of controversial ethical issues, ‘it is usually the professional bioethicist who can be relied on to ...”

“... craze – proved to be an essentially Elizabethan phenomenon. I would place its high-water mark in the year 1599, when A Warning for Fair Women was staged at the Globe. Over at the Rose, a hundred yards away down Maiden Lane, three new murder plays were commissioned by the Lord Admiral’s Men. The first of these was Page of Plymouth by Jonson and ...”

“... in Paris from the 1880s onwards, helped lay the ground for modern FRT. Unlike the eugenicist Francis Galton or the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who believed it was possible to read a person’s criminal type off his face, Bertillon was mundanely preoccupied with identifying criminals by recording their bodily measurements and taking mugshots under ...”

“... way of absorbing a text is to write on the book itself. It was common for Renaissance readers to mark key passages by underlining them or drawing lines and pointing fingers in the margin – the early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and ...”

“... who had ‘cracked the Tudor code’ was the botanist, horticulturalist and historian of gardening Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly ...”

“... who prostrates herself to weep over his feet, but in the versions of the story in Matthew 26 and Mark 14 she pours the costly ointment on his head. The disciples object, saying it would have been better to give the money to the poor, and are reprimanded by Jesus. This woman has long been identified as Mary of Bethany (Pasolini brilliantly cast Natalia ...”

“... of his accomplishment. Foucault is among the first of his targets – in some respects, too easy a mark. For the notion of a ‘Great Confinement’ applies poorly to England, where there was no substantial stateled move to confine the mad (or the poor, come to that) during the 17th or 18th century. Indeed, the management of madness on this side of the Channel ...”

“... vulcanite mouthpieces frequently containing debris with a more or less bad odour.’ In June, Dr Francis Allan, a medical officer of the City of Westminster, reported the results of tests done on swabs taken from the mouthpieces of transmitters in public call boxes. One had attached to it a ‘mass of whitish-grey viscid substance’. The viscid substance ...”

“... the Frari record a rivalry almost in the class of the one described a quarter of a century ago by Francis Haskell, between Francesco Morosini, the Venetian Captain-General of the Sea in the later 17th century, and Antonio Barbaro, his subordinate in the war of Candia, dismissed for incompetence, who used the façade of Santa Maria del Giglio, not far from ...”