“... 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 ...”

“... Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set ...”

“... friends and, as much as possible for someone living in a small town, I tried to renounce what the King James Version calls the friendship of the world (James 4.4). I tried to be polite to my parents. I studied the Bible and read devotional books, inspirational books, books by a woman who’d saved Jews from the Nazis, Corrie ten Boom, books by a disabled ...”

“... it about right. It was pretty motley to be a sort of Jacobite (‘It was a’ for our rightfu’ king’), and also a sort of Jacobin (‘a perjured Blockhead and an unprincipled Prostitute’ was his comment on the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette). Again, mourning Scotland’s loss of independence and praising the British constitution are none ...”

“... and aristocrats, and definitive likenesses of Elizabethan celebrities such as Walter Ralegh and Francis Drake, but many of his portraits are now catalogued under the frustrating title of ‘Unknown Man’ or ‘Woman’. Goldring’s index lists 22, and there are certainly more: their number has grown over the years, as earlier identifications have proved ...”

“... subversive Gemma’s physical eloquence was. The saint first affected by the stigmata was Francis of Assisi, but it has afflicted many more women than men. It insists on the likeness of the believer’s body to that of Christ. It argues that the gender of the redemptive body does not matter. It undermines the notion of a masculine God. It shows that ...”

“... the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No ...”

“... of The Huntsman. According to Gaston Phoebus’s 14th-century Livre de chasse, the hare is ‘king of all venery’. Turner drew and painted several hare chases apart from Rain, Steam and Speed. In one of them, a hare runs over the spot where Harold was felled at the Battle of Hastings. In Apollo and Daphne (c.1837), Daphne prevents Apollo from helping a ...”

“... unassisted genius’; others saw her poetic inventions as nothing more than a talent for mimicry. Francis Williams, a Black Jamaican slave owner, praised her verse in assimilationist terms: ‘Thy body’s white, tho’ clad in sable vest.’ A reader sneered in 1788 that ‘an ourang outang has composed an ode.’ This is why, for Gates, Wheatley was not ...”

“... in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing outsider, master subordinate, male ...”