“... of Biscayne Bay. Before many pages have gone by he has used a carpenter’s level to reassure a young woman that the symmetry of her breasts has not been affected by their recent surgical enlargement, done violence to her boyfriend who got aggressive about this conversation, and speared his would-be assassin with the head of a stuffed marlin. A nice ...”

“... on Megalopolis, a film he first envisaged in the 1970s and filmed (mostly in Georgia) in 2022, Francis Ford Coppola recalled thinking about a famous definition offered by Jean-Luc Godard: a film is composed of a beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in that order. With a little tweaking the phrase helps us to contemplate this sprawling new ...”

“... than a single well-house. At Braceborough, in Lincolnshire, a modest spring was befriended by Dr Francis Willis, who also ran a private madhouse. This – though the author does not say so – was surely the notorious Rev. Francis Willis, doctor and clergyman, who was summoned to the capital with a straitjacket and a trio ...”

“... in King Cameron, and the novel’s secular spirit is summed up in the ‘grace’ pronounced by young Archie, who turns to cattle-rustling for the benefit of his starving neighbours on North Uist: ‘For what we are about to receive, we have only ourselves to thank.’ But these words prove to be bitterly ironic, since neither the draft-dodgers nor the ...”

“... biology and even here did work that was later cited by researchers in the field, including Francis Crick. Feynman made advances in subjects ranging from nanotechnology to quark jets to the fundamental limits of computation. He seemed to know everything and everyone in science. He was well-loved by most of those who knew him, all of whom had Feynman ...”

“... on the practical advantages of learning, Johnson turns the matter into a mini mock-epic. The young rower is identified with Orpheus, who accompanied the Argonauts on their voyage in pursuit of the Golden Fleece. Boswell’s Johnson, the great hero of letters, enlists the boy in an endorsement of the poet’s power and a pagan search for a prize which has ...”

“... In the spring of 2008, shortly after he started reading Infinite Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I’d said it was, one of the greatest literary works of all time; b) but when he got to the ending – 981 pp. body copy, another 96 of small-print endnotes – did I think he was going to think it was worth it? No, I said, the ending’s infuriating, and although the author denied it and I haven’t made a study of the available papers, I still suspect it was to some extent an afterthought, a way of ducking out of a project that, without it, would maybe never have ended at all ...”

“... introduction to Mrs Ernest Leverson was one of the most important things that could happen to a young man,’ persuaded her to turn novelist. Her grandson, Francis Wyndham, has told us that she hated writing,* though it seems almost perverse of her not to enjoy something she did so well. Six novels came out between 1907 ...”

“... over a hundred pounds a year. He was rescued by the rich and childless bursar of his college, Francis Martin, who had heard of his troubles, and offered to support him until he could earn his own living. Martin lavished affection on the handsome, hard-pressed young scholar, but, the authors say, ‘the younger man did ...”

“... a well-meaning but improvident clerk in the navy pay office, was sent to debtors’ prison, with young Charles put to menial work in a blacking factory – a social disgrace that demoralised him and from which he never fully recovered, keeping it a secret from the world (even from his children) until his death. The desire to have this experience ...”

“... She supported herself by working a few days a week at Fry’s Omega Workshops: one of the young women – ‘cropheads’, Virginia Woolf called them, on account of their distinctive bobs – who painted decorative designs onto furniture, fabric, lampshades and other objects. ‘Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant worked sometimes at the Omega ...”

“... have often been, as here, quite casually bisexual. In 1965 Music Upstairs provided an account of a young woman’s drift through London – half-drunk, mostly miserable, half-tranced – in which the heroine’s love affairs with her landlady and landlord are retailed with a wonderfully offhand assurance. Mackay was 18 when she wrote Music Upstairs – a book ...”

“... politics of the Ottoman house.Suleyman came to the throne in 1520, when he was 26. That may sound young, but he was in good company: Francis I, king of France since 1515, had been born in the same year as him, and Henry VIII (crowned in 1509) was three years older. Charles V was installed as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 at ...”

“... Everyone knows that as a young English Jacobin Wordsworth visited France, becoming so intimately entangled in Revolutionary affairs that he might have remained there, eventually to be destroyed in the Terror. Later in life, though, he deliberately suppressed many aspects of his earlier career, in order to represent himself as an elect spirit – the prophet of nature, who had survived triumphantly undisfigured by the turmoil of contemporary history ...”

“... the final defeat and initial regeneration of Germany between 1941 and 1946, especially someone young and idealistic whose work brought them into contact with a range of colourful figures. Annan describes the problems of advising the Director of Military Intelligence, General Francis Davidson, whom it was difficult to ...”