“... father, restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss Repair those violent harms. (King Lear, IV.vii) It is often said that Susanna was Shakespeare’s favourite daughter, and that Judith – who signed her name with an awkward little mark like two pigtails, who was still a spinster at the age of 30 – was always second best. This is ...”

“... Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal.’ Imagine The Godfather with Robert Redford as Michael! But Francis Ford Coppola had wanted Pacino from the start and was finally able to persuade the studio execs after they saw eight minutes of footage from The Panic in Needle Park. Pacino had to fly to California to do a screen test, which he didn’t want to do, but ...”

“... minister, was the first to grow up here, go to Eton and then serve in the Ninth Lancers; Francis, the second lord, went to Eton then served in the Ninth Lancers in the Great War; Savile, the third lord, went to Eton, served in the Ninth Lancers and became Master of the Horse; Hugh, the fourth lord, went to Eton, but dodged the Ninth Lancers; his ...”

“... of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the ...”

“... or five books open around the house,’ Butler said in one of the interviews collected by Consuela Francis in Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009). ‘And I’ll go out for my morning walk … and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce.’The voice of the interviews is pretty much like the voice of Butler’s few but marvellous ...”

“... was probably acquired from a Cockney immigration officer), he was a subject of King George V, and therefore, as he spent a lifetime explaining to interviewers, not a refugee. ‘After the excitements of Berlin, Britain was inevitably a comedown,’ Hobsbawm remembered. ‘Nothing in London had the emotional charge of those ...”

“... sent a letter to the Times condemning her economic policies (the signatories included Mervyn King, the future governor of the Bank of England). They wrote: ‘There is no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control and thereby introduce an ...”

“... peaceable and perceptive whites worked with them, and left records of their co-operation. Around King George Sound in the far southwest, Mokaré and his family regarded the Europeans of the garrison and settlement at Albany as their lifelong guests. They worked out a pidgin language together, shared exploration, and talked at night around campfires and ...”

“... it won’t do to pretend that Plato was merely talking about ‘a bold invention’ – to quote Francis Cornford’s formulation – or a ‘necessary myth’, as it is also sometimes translated. The word Plato uses is pseude, ‘lie’, not muthos, ‘myth’. The Greeks in general weren’t soft on lying. On the contrary, Liddell and Scott cite about two ...”

“... believe this. It’s what they would chant now so they think it was what they did then. The king was never ‘George’ still less the queen ‘Liz’. That was in the future (though not for him). What I remember of that night and of subsequent public celebrations up to and including the Festival of Britain was the impact of floodlighting and the sense ...”

“... with an extraordinary feat of imagination. The utterances of Uriel and Madimi, of El and Il and King Carmara and scores of other spirits, are not voicings from the spirit-world, but improvised dramatic monologues performed by Kelley. Most of it is high-sounding esoteric flannel, but often the words have a strange rolling beauty: ‘I will hold up his house ...”

“... know how … his fear of waste was so strong.’ In this Edward was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian ...”

“... Friedman claimed that postwar Japan and South Korea were exemplars of open, competitive markets; Francis Fukuyama credited the prewar successes of Germany and Japan to ‘economic liberalism’. It’s also true that the social question did not until recently seem as critical in Anglo-America as in late-developing nations. Britain, the first major ...”

“... dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett and Francis Stuart, or offered elaborate comedy, as in Flann O’Brien. In Irish fiction after Joyce, the women suffered and the men were anti-social, and the tone is one of unnerving bleakness. The problem for Moore, McGahern, Higgins and many others was how to ...”

“... and people drop their hard-earned cash into his plastic cup. For dirty, greasy-haired Dave, 19, is king of the hard-faced professional beggars working Central London.’These reports – with their penny-dreadful conflation of begging with theft, social security fraud and gang-violence – have taken their toll in public wariness. People are increasingly ...”