“... goes with my proletarian bent) and Tom Snout, the tinker (he goes with my ironic nature although Francis Flute, the bellows-mender is more fanciful), and the voice of the young wife explaining to her close friend why she had chosen this man for a husband: ‘he’s not handsome but he’s good.’ I hear them! I hear ...”

“... in mainland Europe which followed the end of the Council of Trent in 1563, unlike many young Englishmen of restless spirit and Catholic inclinations.The Somerset House picture is still only half William Byrd. If McCarthy’s publishers had budgeted for a back-cover image, I would have recommended an empty lawn on the fringes of North London: the ...”

“... to eyes accustomed to sculpture in bronze, marble and unpainted wood. Pedro de Mena’s Saint Francis Standing in Ecstasy is made of wood, glass, cord and human hair. Standing less than a metre tall it brings to mind modern coloured sculptures like Ron Mueck’s, which are even more lifelike and also use scale for effect. Works like these persuade you ...”

“... figures whose importance it recovers. Elsewhere the story is in parts familiar. There are the young bloods, Francis Basset and George Legge, Viscount Lewisham, sitting in scarlet coats to Pompeo Batoni, whose portraits by this stage were so formulaic that their subjects might as well have stuck their heads through a ...”

“... of his dynamic father. On Capri he was to see himself as Byron, D.H. Lawrence as Shelley and Francis Brett Young as a more retiring kind of Keats. And Lawrence was fascinated by him, found him sympathetic and good company, and made him the model in his story called ‘The man who loved islands’. The story could just ...”

“... appear, swiftly and rather furtively, to carry off a take-away ordered earlier by telephone. Two young Indian waiters in dinner jackets hover apprehensively at the back of the room, while behind and above them, seated on a raised platform, a somewhat older Indian lady regally presides. To an impressionable customer, she can suggest both the motherly ...”

“... line might lead one to think. Most of it is set in the boarding-school of the 16-year-old hero, Francis Mayne, or in his father’s house in Essex, and it could not be said that this picture of certain events in 1968 has Tolstoyan or, to be fairer, Fordian scope. There are excursions to a village cricket match, a country funeral, the ancient church on the ...”

“... observed with partisan savagery that the prospect of near-universal damnation worried the bright young Calvinists of the 1590s no more than the imminent liquidation of the bourgeoisie worried the bright young Marxists of the 1930s: and something of the same disregarding fire burns in A.S. Byatt so far as her ...”

“... of the spying game. There is in them a curious sense of déjà vu. Under the directorship of Sir Francis Walsingham, the security services featured much the same cast of moles, buggers, double agents and dirty tricksters that has entertained us in more recent spy ‘scandals’. The technology has improved – in Walsingham’s day, the fastest intelligence ...”

“... Trying​ to describe the spectacular summit meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I which took place in June 1520, contemporaries fell into a kind of stupor. It was the eighth wonder of the world, said one. Another thought the temporary palaces – erected at staggering expense for the sole purpose of a fortnight’s worth of jousts and junketing – outdid the ‘miracles of the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman amphitheatres ...”

“... I first met Francis Wyndham in 1968, when I went to the Sunday Times Magazine looking for a job. A thunderstorm in the Gray’s Inn Road had soaked my cheap lightweight blue suit, bought in Johannesburg, and I was thinking my appearance had cost me my chance. At that time everyone – writers and photographers – seemed to want to write for the Magazine, then under the editorship of Godfrey Smith ...”

“... the next opening of Parliament, as well as an armed raid in the Midlands to get hold of James’s young daughter Elizabeth (later the Winter Queen of Bohemia), and set her up as the figurehead of a new regime with, perhaps, the Earl of Northumberland as Protector. Having settled that, they swore an oath of secrecy, and received communion at a Mass said by the ...”

“... distracted. Frail elderly people often have a less robust systemic response to infection than the young and fit, but even so, Mr Wedderburn was flushed with a temperature of 38°C, and was breathing much too quickly. As I listened to his lungs with my stethoscope his fingers picked at the bedcovers, and his feet knocked against his cot-bars. When I took a ...”

“... and facial contours provide a lot of information about ethnicity. She writes about a decomposed young woman bound in tape and folded into a suitcase, who she could confidently say was of East Asian origin: ‘Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, Japan or China. I didn’t think she had the facial characteristics that would take her south into Malaysia or ...”

“... India, pauperism in England, disturbance and disorder in Europe, and robbery everywhere’. As a young woman she worked to relieve the potato famine of 1898, and later spent most of her fairly ample fortune in attempts to alleviate the routine cruelties of British rule. Francis Stuart, who at 17 married Maud’s daughter ...”