“... In Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold, a young woman is hospitalised by the combined forces of an unhappy love affair, an artist’s photograph of her, and her translation of an early 20th-century German novella – this is plausible enough, to Hustvedt’s credit. Her plots depend on the occult power of art and the frailty of our ordinary healthy relation to the world ...”

“... 1962. For all migrants, Britain was ‘the mother country’. Stuart came as a Rhodes scholar, a young anti-colonial, to Oxford. Like most of the Windrush generation he stayed, learning new political identities – first West Indian, then Black – over troubled decades. I learned what it meant to live in a mixed couple, something that carried one set of ...”

“... of special favourites, with Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvett and Henry Guildford. In 1512, the young king went to war with France. Charles was given command of troops for a sea attack on Brittany, to be led by Edward Howard. With Thomas Knyvett on board, the Regent engaged the Cordelière, sailing out of Brest. The Cordelière exploded, and one of the ...”

“... a roughly ten-year cycle, another assessment came due in 1996 and the old material was viewed by Francis Spufford in his eloquent I May Be Some Time with less animus and a more historically minded cultural analysis, mellowing the harshness of the previous ruling. Scott was perhaps a child of the Romantics, a son of the Sublime, a victim of the need for a ...”

“... too. When he began his affair with Janetta, he told her that the last person he had slept with was Francis Bacon – this, Courtauld hazards, on the night he gave Bacon and Anne Dunn dinner at Claridge’s before they all went to bed together. He also gave them £100 each, a lot of money in 1950. Only a few months after Princess Ratibor became his fifth ...”

“... of vulgarity’. Some featured nudity as part of a mysterious mise en scène, as in Francis Bacon’s triptych Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, in which a pair of naked men lie on a peculiar, possibly therapeutic bed. Observers on each side – one suited, one nude (both Bacon’s lover George Dyer) – keep company with animalistic ...”

“... LCS – he did perform a leading role. With a scrupulous sense of this borderline distinction, Francis Place noted down Frend as ‘Mr’ but the other speakers as ‘Citizens’. The SCI was intimidated by the treason trials and it scarcely resumed activity thereafter. When Wordsworth came to London early in 1795 there was no obvious reforming club or ...”

“... been. The funeral procession in London, arranged at the crippling expense of his father-in-law Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by Thomas Lant’s pictorial roll, was the grandest accorded to an English subject before Nelson: a determined show of strength by the forward Protestant party to ...”

“... a largely secretarial capacity) for the UN; she was married to the biographer and Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller (they were introduced by Muriel Spark, which doesn’t seem like the most propitious start) and lived with him in New York, Naples and Capri. She suffered from dementia and died in 2016.Hazzard published four novels – The Transit of Venus ...”

“... Amis-Barnes-Ishiguro as among the younger pillars of British fiction. She was two years too young to receive a full entry in Margaret Drabble’s 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, which featured only writers born before 1939. She wrote feelingly in 1984 about J.G. Ballard, who was, she rightly predicted, about to be turned by ...”

“... himself, and here he addresses a dead friend, whom he believes he has seen in a hotel corridor: ‘Francis, it was you yesterday, though I knew you were dead.’ The experience is offered both as an event that really happened, and as a dream occurring in the midst of        that brief deep And self-satisfied sleep Which is our charmed life – a ...”

“... is that they contain two meanings. For instance, in Spring (1563), the head and shoulders of a young man is represented by many spring flowers. The particular meanings of man and flowers are not as meaningful as that there are two, instead of the usual one. Further, what is exciting is not the two meanings but the relationship between them, the gap and the ...”

“... and the whole tenor of his public and (most important) private life as something which leaves Francis of Assisi looking like John Aspinall. And, lest theologians rush to their nibs to remind me that there are no Quaker saints, let me quote one of those crystalline and unequivocal phrases that all who have read the martyr’s own tapes have imperishably ...”

“... revolution’, with its French and American antecedents – Godwin, of course, Tom Paine, Francis Burdett, Cartwright and, interestingly, William Hazlitt. Throughout, Dr Dawson pays Shelley the tribute – a rare one, as it would certainly have been in the days before the pioneering work of the American scholar Kenneth Neill Cameron – of taking his ...”

“... he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. Her name was Abishag. She was of the tribe of Issachar, from the village of Shunem, and, for that reason, was known as a ...”