“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ultimate crime of not being Margaret Thatcher’, and he became, in the words of the late Hugo Young, ‘a permanently contingent leader’. But he was not alone. Since Major no post-Thatcher Tory has been wholeheartedly accepted throughout the party as the legitimate leader of Conservatism. The rejection of Thatcher by her purported followers marks a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reproduced in Monk’s book, which was taken in Swansea in 1945 by Ben Richards – a young man almost forty years Wittgenstein’s junior with whom he was then despairingly in love. Even at this distance of time, and in two-dimensional monochrome, it is hard to meet Wittgenstein’s gaze full-on for very long. The eyes engage you ...”

“... in literary journals, attacked Popa. ‘How is it possible that such texts can be written by a young writer and published by a renowned literary magazine?’ one demanded to know. The age demanded paeans to the struggle of the working classes and got avant-garde poetry instead. Others griped about Popa’s hermeticism: even the title of the book is ...”

“... of Russia and France for Protestantism to have any impact. Cardinal Newman’s eccentric brother Francis – classicist, anti-vaxxer and pioneer vegetarian – was one of the many young idealists who failed to make a single convert in Syria. He returned home gloomily prophesying that ‘all the Christians of Turkey will ...”