“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”