“... as much of the medieval Alexander, the fictional hero of romantic tradition, as of the ancient King of Macedon. At the moment of his discovery, the impact of America was absorbed in layers of his own reading and made to fit his capacious image of himself. Like the artist who showed Cortés riding into Mexico on an elephant, he accommodated his vision of ...”

“... Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed ...”

“... vs. The Rest Of The Artworld’.) A Humument nods quietly at Phillips’s other projects: ghostly, Francis Bacon-like images recall his career as a portrait painter and Royal Academician; sliced photographs invoke his Postcard Century, which portrays each year of the 20th century through hundreds of annotated postcards; and a pasted-in A-Z excerpt features the ...”

“... of the politicians now in power are ‘the same warlords and murderers’, as Archbishop Michael Francis told me last year. According to the Accra guidelines, sitting politicians are not allowed to stand for election, but there have already been shameless manoeuvrings. ‘People come here and shake my hand,’ Klein says, ‘and they say they want to be ...”

“... the notion of its democratic mode of address. Neither Dunbar’s aureate diction nor the verse of King James I seems particularly democratic; Scott loved the feudal system; MacDiarmid hymned Lenin and rejoined the Communist Party after the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising to make manifest his solidarity with Stalin. Nevertheless, ‘democratic’ is ...”

“... gift. He was given a minor position in the elaborate hierarchy of servants who supplied the king with his every need. Later on he married a woman who was reputed to be a soft-skinned beauty, and the couple had a number of children, most of them hairy like their father. Among the hirsute offspring were three girls: Maddalena, Francesca and Antonietta. As ...”

“... includes prints based on drawings by ‘the best Masters’ of the day, artists such as Francis Barlow and the French academicians Charles Le Brun and Le Clerc) while framing the task as fundamentally accessible: ‘Made easier to the comprehension of Beginners than any book of this kind hitherto made publick.’ The copy from 1755 I looked at had ...”

“... a true believer. All the same, like many who have written about Goya (notable examples are Francis Klingender in Goya in the Democratic Tradition and Fred Licht in Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art), Hughes argues that Goya is in some ways our contemporary; or that he was, at least, the first modern artist. Not unexpectedly, it is Goya as a ...”

“... in the colonies. In 1766, the Pennsylvania Gazette offered a reward for a 21-year-old Irishman, Francis Power, who had escaped from his employers. The men to whom he was indentured, Thomas Barnsley and Herman Vansant, described him as ‘a great lover of strong drink … marked with Indian ink or gunpowder on both arms’ and ‘under his shirt with the ...”

“... and did not hesitate to pass on news that this or that minister had fallen out of favour – Francis Pym was a moaning minnie, John Biffen a semi-detached member of the cabinet. But unlike Campbell, Ingham never became part of the policy-making machine; nobody would have dreamed of dubbing him the deputy prime minister. He did not even attend ...”

“... more remote than ever. After Carrington resigned he was briefly succeeded at the Foreign Office by Francis Pym, until Thatcher won her crushing victory in the 1983 election and replaced him with Geoffrey Howe. He stayed for six years until he was kicked sideways and then, in his quietly devastating resignation speech in November 1990, precipitated Thatcher’s ...”

“... of the play and then to finish on a spectacular death: roles like Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and, above all, Macbeth. Given his long-nourished Anglophobia and the seemingly inevitable collision with Macready which remains the most celebrated event of his career, it may seem odd that Forrest was prepared to stake so much of his reputation on the ...”

“... is having no feeling, not even the flicker of trench humour needed to feel the equivalent of King Lear’s ‘The worst is not so long as we can say “This is the worst.” ’ Things have got beyond the refuge of speech – and besides, she is entirely alone. The almost placid end of Good Morning, Midnight, when the hated commercial traveller in his ...”

“... however, silent on an ominous prelude to all this, which Nicholl has uncovered in the writings of Francis Sparry, the draughtsman who was left behind and captured by the Spanish. Relating the incident from prison, he says, in Nicholl’s translation: ‘There gathered a large number of Indians in canoes to prevent any further ascent of the river. The ...”