“... a celebration in the Sistine Chapel on 23 June with the pope and two hundred honoured guests, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the contemporary and modern art collection at the Vatican Museums. I am somehow one of these two hundred; either that, or it is a trap. ‘I think if you’re invited to meet the pope, you go,’ Jason tells me. ‘It will make a ...”

“... In between, most of the 15 or more versions have been made by men. The best-known of them are Francis Steegmuller and Gerard Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further question ...”

“... bigger margin one way or the other. The narrowest margin in modern times is two votes, achieved by Mark Oaten for the Liberal Democrats at Winchester in 1997; his Tory opponent managed to get the result declared void by the courts on the grounds that some of the ballot papers had not been properly stamped. Oaten won the rematch with a majority of more than ...”

“... For​ several years, I have been following the case of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, the couple who went on the run from social services and the police in January 2023, in order to prevent their baby girl being taken into care. Marten was raised in wealth and privilege: a large landed estate, acquaintance with royalty, private schools, trust funds ...”

“... Anna, in a photo of 1928, seated at her father’s right hand. Oddly enough, the same concerns mark Freud and the Humanities, a collection of lectures given at All Souls during 1984. Michelangelo’s Moses glowers on the cover, supporting the assertion with which the preface starts, that dead founders live: ‘The extra lifetime’s work denied to Freud ...”

“... Cobbett’s appeal to more conservative, even reactionary people is not surprising. It was the mark of a ‘patriot’ in his time to be for ever praising the past. To be a patriot was to be a spokesman for the ‘old ways’ of the people against the bad modern king, lords and parliament. Hazlitt mildly criticised this tendency in Cobbett’s left-wing ...”

“... do a lot for an ambitious person. It created bonds. One of Logan’s friends, the German Quaker Francis Daniel Pastorius, attracted the attention of the great William Penn when he put a grandiose Latin inscription over the door of his cabin: ‘Parva domus sed amica bonis, procul este prophani’ – ‘It’s a little house but welcoming to good ...”

“... to Sandby even by his admirers, a term that managed to appear at once innocently descriptive and a mark of inferiority. Samuel Redgrave, in his biographical dictionary of artists first published in 1874, remarked that Sandby ‘did not get beyond topography and the mere tinted imitation of nature’; of Francis Jukes, on the ...”

“... Irish independence and British devolution.At the heart of Bucknell’s book is an examination of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which Ezra Pound denounced three-quarters of a century later as a ‘stinking sugar teat’, but which sold very well from the outset and, as Bucknell ...”

“... Brick Lane brewery to celebrate the organisation which had, in the words of its current chairman (Francis Carnwarth, the personable banker who took over from Mark Girouard), ‘saved 18th-century Spitalfields’. There were warm memories from the early days of art-historical activism: the squats and sit-ins which the ...”

“... Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers. This was reinforced in the 19th century, the high-water mark of European colonialism, when cannibalism came to be considered as confirmatory evidence of the inherent degeneracy and inferiority of its practitioners. Lestringant’s book is a masterly review of a vast field, but strongest when dealing with the ...”

“... emotion – in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge throughout her life. With ...”

“... be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more difficult. His private life was extraordinary ...”

“... among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the ...”

“... he is allegedly explaining modern art. At the other end of the scale, realist works range from Mark Wallinger’s hyper-realist racehorse pictures and Richard Patterson’s monumental painting of a tiny plastic model of a minotaur through to the ‘bad’ and faux-naif portraiture of Martin Maloney and James Rielly. Other painters adapt traditional Realist ...”