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“... to the city. There he was determined above all to visit the house in which the ambassador of the King of Persia lived. He had the vague hope that he might somehow find a clue there.’ This is typical in its over-emphasis. It’s a perfectly ordinary moment in the story, which needs one or two functional sentences, not ‘above ...”

“... British Isles at any date. A late and sadly unreliable anecdote conveys something of his style. Francis Kynaston reported in the early 17th century that when Henryson was dying of diarrhoea (probably around 1500) a cunning woman told him to go and circle a rowan tree chanting ‘whikey tree, whikey tree, take away this flux from me.’ Henryson is reported ...”

“... within a wider ecology of making. Theophilus, Diderot and Gropius all viewed the craftsman as king, and the workshop as an unparalleled laboratory of observation. The idea that the artist’s studio was somehow different from the artisan’s workshop took off in the 15th century. In Hall’s phrase, ‘the Renaissance concept of the studio involved a ...”

“... are merely ornaments and which are handles. This commode also formed part of an ensemble: as Francis Watson explains in the preface to his 1956 catalogue of the furniture in the Wallace Collection, it fitted below a mirror and its ormolu ornaments matched the gilded carving of the panelling by Jacques Verberckt. Watson’s preface also includes a ...”

“... mix. Conrad’s favourite writer, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, the Scottish laird – the real king of Scotland, some say – spent several years in San Antonio, attempting to become a cattle baron, going broke, and then, out of desperation, beginning his writing career with an account of a hanging in Cotulla for the San Antonio Express. Stephen Crane ...”

“... stops because he has run out of animal comparisons. It took a while for this manner to change. King John, a bit later, has some intensities of a sort not to be found in its predecessors, but it remembers the old redundancies. Here Salisbury is protesting against the King’s decision to be crowned a second ...”

“... And, 4. She had an outcry. Then the Interpreter compares the hen to God, whom he calls ‘your King’. The comparison speaks to ordinary experience, as does this paragraph in Grace Abounding: But God did not utterly leave me, but followed me still, not now with convictions, but judgments; yet such as were mixed with mercy. For once I fell into a creek of ...”

“... conceptions of modern science and technology, and hence part of this history. In the 17th century, Francis Bacon pioneered the notions of knowledge as an underground seam or deposit, and of research as an assault on ‘nature’s womb’ in order to uncover its secrets. In Bacon’s New Atlantis, the sages of Solomon’s House boast of the artificial caves, up ...”

“... Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever written ... I am not, of ...”

“... and natural jouissance are rooted far back in the Ulster Enlightenment, especially in the work of Francis Hutcheson, the Ulster-Scots philosopher who is known as the founder of the Scottish Enlightenment (Hutcheson’s aesthetics and Shaftesbury’s are closely linked). Flying over the Isle of Man, then down Belfast’s blue sea-lough to the concrete apron on ...”

“... chief among them the subject’s hands. One hand alone may clutch the brow (Martin Luther King, 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip (Colette, 1952) or into the lower lip (Tony Hancock, 1962), or feel the forelock (Francis Bacon, 1981); two hands may flatten ...”

“... decided both to promulgate the law and to ask that it not be applied. This declaration, worthy of King Ubu, goes to the heart of the problem. In order for human beings to live together without killing one another, they need to agree on common rules to which all alike are subject. The institution of these rules, which was for a long time the province of ...”

“... small bottle of Paxarete the only one left of the Dessert wine of Ferdinand IV’. (Ferdinand was king of Naples and of the Two Sicilies.) Less potable, but more useful, was a connection with the Prince Consort, who joined the RI in 1843, and began to attend lectures with some regularity from 1849. Albert was the apotheosis of what the RI might now call its ...”

“... Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the ...”

“... called themselves Franci, whether or not they were French-speaking or subjects of the French king, and so those they encountered in the east called them by that name, transliterated into Greek or Arabic. Westerners relished the name’s ambiguity: in their contemporary parlance Franci had come to mean French, and Francia, France, but Franci also denoted ...”