“... end of history simply contribute another event to the history they declare over and done with, as Francis Fukuyama has no doubt been discovering from his post-bag. They are self-disconfirming prophecies, Cretan Liar paradoxes which, like all appeals to make it new, add one more item to that venerable lineage known as the avant-garde. Besides, you can only ...”

“... the Afternoon, Winner Take Nothing, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, To Have and Have Not, Green Hills of Africa. The writing of these dominates and knits together Reynolds’s narrative. There are only two episodes of extended action: Hemingway’s safari to British East Africa in 1933 and his coverage of the ...”

“... of many small relics gnawed under the pretext of a reverent kiss – from the embalmed body of St Francis Xavier’. The Fascist asks Lewis how rich Ernesto is. He says there is no means of knowing. Travelling in the Balkans, Lewis met a successful author called Ladislas Farago, who was to make a million pounds, many years later, by pretending to meet ...”

“... secretaryship of the Society of Arts) when he was 30, his apprenticeship left its mark. He would not have learned the precision (or had the breadth of interests) necessary to plan a grand encyclopedia if he had gone through what was then the conventional musical education – nor, indeed, would he have if he had read Classics at one of the ...”

“... to renovating the English language and the English aristocracy. From 1533, when he visited Francis I’s new palace and gallery at Fontainebleau in the company of Henry Fitzroy, Sessions argues, Surrey perceived the historical destiny of art as the agent of moral and political renovation. It is surely right to attach revolutionary importance to the ...”

“... might still just about be salvaged. Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the ...”

“... by proxy, championing the cause of their own ‘red-faced, roaring’ militant High Churchman, Francis Higgins. Later they delighted in the fortunes of the Tory lawyer Constantine Phipps, whose eventual reward for his role as one of Sacheverell’s defence counsel was the Lord Chancellorship of Ireland. In England, the focus of public attention shifted ...”

“... that Schiaparelli found the intellectual and artistic stimulation for which she longed. She met Francis Picabia’s wife, Gabrielle, on the transatlantic crossing and through her came to know Duchamp, who had arrived in New York with a glass globe full of Paris air, and Man Ray, who took the first of his many photographs of her. Her powerful, unbeautiful ...”

“... that followed the meeting on 2 December dissuaded moderate reformers in Parliament such as Sir Francis Burdett from supporting the popular agitation. To his credit, Hunt stuck to his principles and to the campaign. At the third meeting on Spa Fields in February 1817, commenting on Parliament’s rejection of a petition for parliamentary reform, he ...”

“... for an ever-lengthening extension of the charter.The two sieges of Namur are also thought to mark a novelty of a different sort: throughout the desperate and bloody fighting, the government encouraged public interest in and support for the war. The sieges were a media circus. It was the birth of war tourism. As Macaulay points out, there were plenty of ...”

“... prison camp come closer than anything officially commissioned. It was only after the war, in Francis Bacon’s screaming, distorted figures, that something was produced that could conceivably be thought of as addressing the worst of what had happened in Europe. When John Russell said to Moore, ‘In your own work the shelter drawings would be the ...”

“... great damage to British sculpture. In the fourth issue he prints Grey Gowrie’s appreciation of Francis Bacon, written for the catalogue of the exhibition of Bacon’s work in the Soviet Union, when the first issue contained an attack of his own on Bacon’s art, as life-diminishing when compared with Graham Sutherland’s (the comparison also forms the ...”

“... of the virtues of The Book History Reader is that it brings such continuities to light, pairing Mark Rose’s densely particularised history of copyright law with Foucault and Barthes on authorship, or Janice Radway’s lovingly detailed reconstruction of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s marketing strategies with Stanley Fish’s aggressively perverse model ...”

“... thriller about the danse macabre that goes on between a skilled con man and a well-chosen mark, partly a global-historical blockbuster with variants on the obligatory tropes: lurid sex, wicked priests, Egyptology, Nazis. But it is also, most interestingly, a sustained study of the clash between the idea of historical truth as a set of objective facts ...”

“... of the United States are rich in cases of judges who have joined their customers in jail. (True, Francis Bacon in 1621 had to resign the Lord Chancellorship for taking bribes, but he explained engagingly that this had not meant that he necessarily gave judgment in favour of the donors. And Lord Chancellor Macclesfield was impeached and fined in 1725 for ...”