“... 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 ...”

“... man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of recent years is the group of translations, by Thomas Kinsella, of poems assembled by Sean O Tuama, and brought out in a dual-language anthology called An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the ...”

“... blisful martir’); St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian mystic; St Francis of Assisi; and St Dominic, less charismatic but a better administrator, whose Domini canes (‘hounds of the Lord’) served as frontline inquisitors while the rival Franciscans splintered in internal discord. Among those inquisitors was the Legend’s ...”

“... one of the 43rd, trying to hold in his bowels.’ There is much more in this vein. ‘O that the King and President were both here this moment to see the misery their quarrels lead to,’ one American wife cried as she nursed her wounded husband; ‘they surely would not go to war without cause that they could give as a reason to God at the last day, for ...”

“... who had hoped to take part in the climb, joined the search for the bodies. They never found Lord Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were ...”

“... too. When he began his affair with Janetta, he told her that the last person he had slept with was Francis Bacon – this, Courtauld hazards, on the night he gave Bacon and Anne Dunn dinner at Claridge’s before they all went to bed together. He also gave them £100 each, a lot of money in 1950. Only a few months after Princess Ratibor became his fifth ...”

“... 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 ally, Sir Francis Burdett, who was always ‘wanting to go back to the early times of our Constitution and history in search of the ...”

“... acolytes and admirers, what Thomson calls his ‘dread of the thing most desired’. ‘I’m a king actor,’ Welles admitted in a late interview, ‘maybe a bad one, but that’s what I am, you see. And I have to play authoritative roles.’ He also understood the precariousness at the heart of such roles: ‘Truffaut was quite right when he says about me ...”

“... piety’ (whatever that may be). In 1952 he went all the way to Goa to venerate the body of St Francis Xavier. ‘One brown stump of toe emerging from white wrapping,’ he noted approvingly. ‘Body fully vested, one grey forearm and hand, and grey clay-like skull visible.’ This seems only a step away from the pet cemetery in Forest Lawn, and Waugh’s ...”

“... Velázquez’s surviving work. They are tall – as tall as many a full-dress portrait of the king – and narrow: an inch short of six feet high, and just a little over three feet across. This suggests that they were conceived together; some historians have thought they may have hung in the same room; the inventory almost says so, but not quite. It is ...”

“... series of eye-problems, partly the effects of undiagnosed porphyria, which eventually left the king blind. He was fascinated by the stage, and in the 1780s became drama critic for the Morning Post. He cultivated the friendship of actors, dramatists, theatre managers, with extraordinary assiduity; indeed, over a period of more than forty years he seems to ...”

“... above a certain archness when he speaks of ‘the great intellectual Western racialists such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and G.W.F. Hegel’, finds racialist ‘truths’ less easy to come by. After all, as he points out, when blacks begin to produce ‘literature’, they make a revolution by that very activity. The ...”

“... past. There was much talk of ‘the new philosophy’, and in The Advancement of Learning (1605) Francis Bacon argued that philosophy could no longer be regarded as a mere propaedeutic, to be ‘studied but in passage’. Ancient philosophy might be dead, but with the blessing of King James, a fertile new philosophy was ...”

“... his name to the proclamation by which he sought to induce Napoleon’s soldiers to desert to the king. Though seized with military fervour, d’Arblay spent the war safely at Trèves. It was Fanny who was in Brussels during the Waterloo campaign. Her letters have become a prime historical source for the tension beforehand (‘How awful is this ...”