“... third and last year as external examiner in the Department of Literature? Flying in, I was reading Francis Mulhern’s The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’. As I first looked over the students’ scripts, I thought of the Leavisite insistence that literature was the queen of all arts disciplines, the key to survival of national culture and international ...”

“... of Scotland’s rulers, led an army of unusual size and quality into northern England. The young Henry VIII had embarked on a military expedition in northern France, and Scotland responded to French calls for aid by invading England. James IV’s army was equipped with an impressive number of modern cannon cast in bronze and was accompanied by ...”

“... of clothes is something Wright learned during his apprenticeship with Thomas Hudson. In 1762 Francis Knowle Clark Mundy inherited Markeaton Hall. He had Wright paint him and five of his friends in the livery of the Markeaton Hunt – his father and five of his friends had sat to Devis 13 years before. Wright poses them casually. Harry Peckham stands with ...”

“... explanation, and an attempt to provide it has been made by Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, in The Young Richelieu. The attempt is bravely made, and it rests on solid archival research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives, the British Library and other places. Yet, though the attempt to provide a psychological explanation of Richelieu and his family ...”

“... its contents, the sort of relation which is so mysteriously paramount in everything about which Francis Kilvert writes. Simon Brett remarks, very truly, that one of the pleasures of reading a diary rather than a memoir is the strong – and as it were involuntarily accurate – impression one forms of the diarist, an impression quite independent of his own ...”

“... futile’. He was what is now known as an abuser. He derived sexual pleasure from causing pain to young boys, especially by smacking their bare buttocks. All the boys at School House, Shrewsbury, knew of this abuse. The identities of Trench’s special victims were also well known. Peel quotes the then headmaster of Shrewsbury, Jack Peterson, describing the ...”

“... in the colonies. In 1766, the Pennsylvania Gazette offered a reward for a 21-year-old Irishman, Francis Power, who had escaped from his employers. The men to whom he was indentured, Thomas Barnsley and Herman Vansant, described him as ‘a great lover of strong drink … marked with Indian ink or gunpowder on both arms’ and ‘under his shirt with the ...”

“... put it in British Rail parlance, the wrong sort of prodigy, i.e. not a rebel or iconoclast, but a young man who pleased and impressed his elders. He was a dishy and precocious 16-year-old – still chaperoned by his banker father – when he first appeared at the epicentre of the weird and fevered Viennese literary scene, the Café Griensteidl opposite the ...”

“... so evident in The Wealth of Nations, and was intrigued by the moral philosophy of the Ulsterman Francis Hutcheson, an engaging and enthusiastic teacher whose demotion of the role of reason in the moral life inspired Smith’s own psychological approach to ethics. Yet whereas Hutcheson associated human benevolence with a moral sense, analogous to our ...”

“... but sure, to the Widow Bull’s victualling house in Deptford, where in spring 1593 four young men spent a day drinking wine in the garden. Mrs Bull’s house was not a tavern, nor was she a sort of Mistress Quickly, half-expecting a fight to break out as the sun declined. She was a bailiff’s widow, with some court connections; her house was a ...”

“... his sons with intimate boasts about such subjects as Gloria Swanson’s genitalia; groping the young woman friends his daughters brought to the house, while at the same time setting private detectives to shadow his daughters to ensure no men took liberties with them. The young Kennedy boys were left with a pathological ...”

“... now is simply an observation of the kind of times we live in and how attitudes develop among our young people. Over the last weekend I saw a movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was ...”

“... all in the name of bringing civilisation to people who were thought to be ‘barbarous’. Francis Suther, the principal factor of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland and organiser of the evictions of 1819-20, described these homes as ‘huts’. When the Sutherlands entered on their ‘reforms’, they thought there were three thousand people living in ...”

“... bottles filled with peanuts vie with beggars for the attention of passers-by. People step around a young man lying on his front in the middle of the pavement, hand outstretched, flip-flops on his elbows to prevent chafing. Francis Obiekezie, who runs a second-hand clothes shop in the market, is one of the many people I have ...”

“... the Uganda of General Amin, portrayed with increasing horror through the eyes of a naive young Scottish doctor. He evidently remembers Uganda very well (as I can vouch, having lived there a little earlier) and, in his second novel, it is obvious that he also knows Natal. Ladysmith tells of the 118-day siege of the British garrison town, the ...”