“... plot to demoralise the nation.How and why are these ghosts being raised in countries where many young people don’t even remember Communism? Anti-Communists ask a simple question – ‘If capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still miserable?’ – and offer an equally straightforward answer: it is because we don’t yet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Afew​ weeks ago, I came across a young poet saying that the book he had been turning to during Covid was Francis Ponge’s Le Parti Pris des choses. (Siding with Things, the translation of the title in the old Faber Selected Poems, is clever, capturing as it does Ponge’s mixture of gentleness and misanthropy ...”

“... earlier the gallery had bought a painting attributed to Filippino Lippi and dated 1492 of Saint Francis of Assisi with Angels. After it was cleaned and re-examined in 2002 it was redescribed as a Botticelli of 1475-80. The 1492 date had been a later addition: the resemblance to other Botticellis of the 1470s was established, with the green in the ...”

“... the trellises on the cafeteria’s north-facing terrace is the building site of the forthcoming Francis Crick Institute, whose research laboratories will open in 2015: 1500 people are expected to work there. To the west is the Ossulston Estate, or the ‘Ring Road of the Proletariat’, as it’s also known, a Grade II listed housing project inspired by the ...”

“... the instructions of the poet’s widow and son in repainting the portrait of Tennyson as a young man which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence. Earlier she had asked Watts to repaint ...”