“... manifestly, an Edinburgh figure: born there, schooled there, a city advocate, Kames’s protégé. Francis Jeffrey, a boy in 1790, once helped carry the intoxicated Boswell to bed. Next morning, on waking the hungover genius, Jeffrey’s head was patted. ‘If you go on as you’ve begun,’ said the bloated biographer, ‘you may live to be a Bozzy ...”

“... by a manuscript illustration of boys skating and sledging, represent the environment in which the young Becket grew up, but we’re given little sense of the city itself with its diverse population of recent immigrants, foreign merchants, and its notable Jewish community. The young Becket was proud of his roots. An example ...”

“... The earliest here were made in 1993-99 and present her own furious portrait of the artist as a young woman. A gaudy jumble of colours and scripts, with cut-out wonky capitals, salvaged and embroidered emblems, and patched pieces of journals and private messages, these are powerful works, assembled at the slow speed of handicraft to communicate cris de ...”

“... sea-run adult will seek to return at least once in its life: an impulse that was confirmed by Francis Bacon in the 1620s, when he tied ‘a Ribband or some known tape or thred’ around the tail of a sea-bound smolt, retrieving it the following year when the fish returned as a splendid silver grilse. ‘Smolt’, ‘grilse’: as Richard Shelton ...”

“... away from Jean Rhys, but in any case they would hardly have appealed to each other. When she was young she liked adventurers, and married one, but later in her long life she preferred gentle and gentlemanly types who wanted to cherish her, though they seldom or never succeeded. As Carole Angier acutely observes, she gravitated towards men with ‘social ...”

“... the army. That was a great deal too smart for me. The law was allowed to be genteel enough; many young men, who had chambers in the Temple, made a very good appearance in the first circles, and drove about town in very knowing gigs. But I had no inclination for the law … As for the navy, it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the subject was ...”

“... and combative portrait with background (to annex Tom’s own title for his profile of Guy Burgess) Francis Wheen doesn’t consider the social-democratic aspect of oral and homosexual promiscuity as much as he does the allegedly crypto-Communist angle that has lately been superimposed upon it. A whole flock of mediocre scavangers, from Chapman Pincher to ...”

“... under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they have picked ‘all day’ at Chatwin’s insistence and which he has finicked down to an airy nothing. His host in Shropshire, Martin Wilkinson, recalls a ...”

“... now. In straw polls he is in everyone’s top three. Unexpected people turn out to have been fans: Francis Bacon liked his brushwork. It was not always so. ‘Pierre Bonnard. Is he a Great Painter?’ Cahiers d’art asked at the time of his death in 1947. They decided he wasn’t and that only those whose taste was confined to the facile and pleasing would ...”

“... guise, and so helps to reinforce it. They are end-of-history texts, fictional equivalents of Francis Fukuyama, which deny that reality could be transformed in the very act of proclaiming how it could be improved. The Island of Liberty (1848) shows an enlightened aristocrat carrying out an experiment in human equality on a South Sea island, a project ...”

“... the morality and monotheism of the Judeo-Christian faiths. A rich portrait is conjured up of a fey young man in a flower-filled palace married to a beautiful queen – a loving father, a sensitive poet: ‘You rise beautifully, o living sun disk, lord of eternity, you are glittering, beautiful, strong, your love great and mighty ...’ Some modern ...”

“... being aware of the great love between Frances and Ralph, and feeling a certain fascination, young as I was, because this didn’t seem exactly like what I’d heard in the current pop songs. It was a force which is unsentimentally documented here: I sit writing with my back to the log fire which crackles softly and flicks tongues of light into the ...”

“... She never quite recaptured this touch till Vera (1921), which describes her second marriage, to Francis Russell. This book made his brother, Bertrand Russell, decide to warn his children never to marry a novelist. Elizabeth published 22 novels and lived in 35 different houses, leaving a mass of papers, letters and diaries. They were deposited in the ...”

“... 90 ponies to transport the family there, in 1929, over the 14,000-foot Burzil Pass; en route, the young nanny (who left the author her diaries and albums) suffered ‘Bursilitis’, a severe blistering caused by sun on frosted flesh, and her facial appearance made her look, in her own words, like ‘an Egyptian mummy in specs’. Gilgit was the sort of place ...”

“... was the first of the women to marry, and she married ‘out’ by choosing the Classical scholar Francis Cornford, 12 years her senior. The first man (probably the one with least homosexual leanings) was Jacques Raverat. He had been deeply involved with Ka Cox, but when she fell for Brooke he quickly proposed to and married Gwen Darwin: this set off an ...”