“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been. The funeral procession in London, arranged at the crippling expense of his father-in-law Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by Thomas Lant’s pictorial roll, was the grandest accorded to an English subject before Nelson: a determined show of strength by the forward Protestant party to ...”

“... Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 years after it was put up, the Russian Ministry of Culture dismantled and completely refurbished ...”

“... University Press and later as an English lecturer at the university itself, Williams made his mark through those he published, those he encouraged and, above all, those he impressed. He struck people as amazing. His energy was famous, his conversation a flood. At OUP, he would march into the office, bound up the stairs and immediately write down the ...”

“... admits, that the Mail’s campaigns against Prince Louis of Battenberg, Richard Haldane and Francis Trippel for supposed German sympathies were disgraceful. His account of the politics of 1914-16 gets too deeply mired in the detail of Northcliffe’s various crusades, interspersed with special pleading, for him to effectively make the point – now ...”

“... of Russia and France for Protestantism to have any impact. Cardinal Newman’s eccentric brother Francis – classicist, anti-vaxxer and pioneer vegetarian – was one of the many young idealists who failed to make a single convert in Syria. He returned home gloomily prophesying that ‘all the Christians of Turkey will become Romanist.’ But though the ...”

“... his life. In his late fifties now, he writes, as though the thought were new to him: ‘It is the mark of a true love that one thinks of what the other suffers. For he suffers too, is also a poor devil.’ What alarms here is the very banality of the thought, and indeed one looks in vain for any similar sentiment in his earlier romantic ...”

“... minutes the room would erupt with laughter, usually at some bleary-eyed sarcasm from David Davis. Francis Maude, laughing louder than anyone, would then restore everyone to order.’ On the other hand, Mr Anderson neatly decapitates a few enemies. One of them is the unfortunate David Shaw, MP for Dover, who is claimed to have laid down conditions for giving ...”

“... something of a high-wire act, risking bathos on the one side, forced extravaganza on the other. Francis Wyndham was not alone in feeling a certain weary exasperation, commenting of one of her books that ‘there must be less to life than this.’ Like her own Fevvers, however, Carter saw herself as committed to a death-defying act as a storyteller in ...”

“... put the figure of those who get help from the government at 96 per cent. So, in the words of Mark McKinnon, a former political adviser to George W. Bush, ‘Romney’s comment managed to offend just about everyone in America.’ No it didn’t. The 96 per cent don’t think in one mind about anything. Many of the 47 per cent will self-identify with the ...”

“... favourite then joined up with two courtiers, Endymion Porter (who had been born in Spain) and Sir Francis Cottington, and set sail for France on 19 February. They were thoroughly sick on the voyage. The small party was conspicuous enough to be identified by a group of German tourists outside Paris, so they took the precaution of buying periwigs to thicken ...”

“... with progress to a more equal society. New Labour is often derided on the Left as an ‘SDP Mark 2’. But as the pair acknowledge, the original SDP was incorrigibly Old Labour by Blairite standards. They have more time for David Owen’s later ‘tough love’ posture, though preferring what they call a ‘rounded’ blend of social market and ...”