“... saints’ most appealing qualities is their ability to restore harmony between man and beast. St Francis preached to the birds and invented the Christmas crèche, using a live ox and ass, while other saints protected hares from hunters or drew thorns out of lions’ paws. The oddest story is told, once again, of St Cuthbert. Forced by Viking raids to leave ...”

“... her. And he sees how he can use her fall to punish the four men, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston and George Boleyn (Anne’s brother), who six years before acted in the court masque that celebrated the fall of Cromwell’s master, Cardinal Wolsey. The events of the year 1535-36 become an improvised revenge tragedy, with Cromwell using Anne’s ...”

“... for the souls of the penitent on earth as well as for the wept-for departed.’ Thomas Becket and Francis of Assisi were both noted for their tears. St Francis was reputed to have gone blind with his weeping for the sufferings of Christ. On his deathbed, he remembered to thank his donkey for carrying him through his arduous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to Toulon’s naval installations, certainly devoted an unusual amount of attention to a circle of young female followers, with whom he frequently picnicked and danced in the countryside. Cadière, the poor daughter of an olive oil merchant who had died during her infancy, rapidly emerged as the ‘shining star’ of this coterie after the two met in ...”

“... cut loose from mere storytelling, became the stuff of Hollywood iconography. The great virtue of Francis O’Gorman’s Oxford Authors edition of everything Emily (or Charlotte, acting as literary executor) saw fit to print – based on the texts of the 1846 and 1850 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell and the 1847 Wuthering Heights – is that it ...”

“... own, hogging the Queen’s Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes ‘the National Service Experience, 1945-63’ in his worthy book, The Best Years of Their Lives: he feels sorry that he was too young to meet this challenge himself. By the Sixties all we conscripts had ...”

“... for stained glass and for white satin and deep blue velvet. The men must be away on the crusades. Young women are sobbing beside tombs or seated in Gothic cloisters. Most are dressed in the style of 1280, but some in that of 1820, and there are numerous attractive young nuns in timeless habits. Hill illustrates a painting ...”

“... husband, and a close friend of men and women of the intellectual calibre of Bentham, the young John Stuart Mill, Francis Jeffrey, until recently editor of the Edinburgh Review, the Grotes, the Romillys, the Carlyles. A more weighty anchor to conventionality was her ten-year-old daughter Lucy. All this was now put ...”

“... of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by John Day, another playwright, in 1599. John Lyly, who gave up writing for 15 years ...”

“... too, and takes off on an extraordinary literary ramble from which it never returns and in which Francis Coppola and his team seem to have decided to do The Golden Bough as their Christmas pantomime. The confused ending weighs on the film but doesn’t wreck it, so we don’t need to hush up the confusion or pretend it isn’t confusion at all. Apocalypse ...”

“... illustrations, over two thousand five hundred music-type examples – if the dust-cover of Percy Young’s biography of its founder is to be believed. The New Grove, as it is called, is not really the product of a machine (though rumours of its adventures with computer setting have sometimes made it seem so), but its editorial set-up has tended to give that ...”

“... dinner with the Sedleys in Vanity Fair. The curry is so hot that her tears flow, and seeing this young Jos offers her chillies, which she gratefully accepts because they sound so cool. There is a roar of laughter at her ensuing distress, its heartlessness showing what the family are like, as well as making the little adventuress herself much more human. At ...”

“... acquired all his knowledge at second-hand from informants such as Hastings’s arch-enemy Philip Francis. Indeed, the strangest feature of the impeachment was that Warren Hastings was the man in the dock. For in contrast to his more openly greedy predecessors, Hastings is credited with having established a genuinely enlightened despotism in Bengal. Seeking ...”

“... fairer Scotland and UK have been created; if those are implemented, all of us will have won. Gavin Francis On​ the evening of Friday, 19 September, hundreds of loyalists congregated in George Square in Glasgow. Some bought Union flags from hawkers; most had brought their own. Women dressed in red, white and blue sang ‘you can stuff your independence up ...”