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“... for the souls of the penitent on earth as well as for the wept-for departed.’ Thomas Becket and Francis of Assisi were both noted for their tears. St Francis was reputed to have gone blind with his weeping for the sufferings of Christ. On his deathbed, he remembered to thank his donkey for carrying him through his arduous ...”

“... Another Rodin statue, entitled Iris, stood on a low round table in the sitting-room, in front of Francis Bacon’s painting of two men wrestling on a bed, known as ‘The Buggers’. Rodin’s Iris is a headless figure, her legs are splayed, her genitals the central vortex of the whole erotically charged form. Many of Lucian’s naked portraits remind me of ...”

“... A nest of gossip and expertise, and a delightful garden still haunted by the reasonable spirit of Francis Bacon.’ All this will presumably annoy those who value the darker, early McEwan, not the comfortable, slightly smug later version. And there is something mildly provoking about his elaboration of the Roy Jenkins-style good life: Fiona and Jack, with ...”

“... invested biblical landscapes with the elegiac force of childhood experience. The Hellenist Matthew Arnold pointed out in his contemptuous analysis of Nonconformist Hebraism that the fervours of chapel-goers were often rooted in provincial experience. He was not wrong, though he failed to see that this might be part of the point. Despite the ...”

“... from the period. When Harington’s lesser efforts are also taken into account – a supplement to Francis Godwin’s Catalogue of Bishops, the short relation of his time in Ireland (which he wrote as part of an audacious but failed attempt to be made Chancellor of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin in 1605), his translation of the School of Salerne (a popular ...”

“... state William Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and chilly distance from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ‘chaw’ for ‘chew’, calls himself ‘Jeems’ and offends British officials with his crude racist ...”

“... descendants of old Josiah’. The sinister Victorian expert on intellectual and racial heredity Francis Galton made serious work of theories of descent: both of his grandfathers were also Lunar men. Despite impoverished beginnings, the prestige and capital of the leading clans of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy evolved from the startling achievements ...”

“... design. Exhibiting modern art was another way to increase cultural cachet. Tyers commissioned Francis Hayman and Hubert-François Gravelot, who illustrated Richardson’s Pamela, to create fifty large genre paintings to be hung in the supper boxes that surrounded the grove (the punishment the pictures took from weather and food was severe). Vauxhall’s ...”

“... were subject to the same evolutionary laws, why not do this with them? Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton had created something of a splash in 1869 with his Hereditary Genius, purporting to correlate high achievement with particular bloodlines. In work by others inspired by Galton’s example, the easily transmitted cultural advantages of a social ...”

“... the only new recruit made in the 20th century to the first rank of Old Masters was (as the late Francis Haskell pointed out) Georges de La Tour, whose brilliantly lit pickpocket and solemn, candlelit Magdalen both derive from Caravaggio’s inventions. The reassessment of Caravaggio was in part due to the advent of loan exhibitions, to the cleaning and ...”

“... him – when a letter of his was discovered in 1974, among the papers of Anthony Bacon (brother of Francis) at Lambeth Palace. It was written on 1 August 1593, two months after Marlowe’s death, and it shows Drury was closely involved in these events. He writes: There was a command laid on me lately to stay one Mr Bayns, which did use to resort unto ...”

“... paid adviser for Greensill while he was acting as a non-executive director of the Cabinet Office. Francis Maude, another member of the House of Lords, has also been drawn into the scandal: he was Cabinet Office minister when the doors of Whitehall were opened to Lex Greensill. (Maude, who is currently undertaking a government review of his former ...”

“... of applied art and romantic landscape, and of what now looks like late Post-Impressionism – Matthew Smith, Duncan Grant, Frances Hodgkins, Victor Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in ...”

“... more will mean worse, is as old as the Industrial Revolution. The classic 19th-century instance is Matthew Arnold’ Culture and Anarchy, with its appeal for the preservation, through education, of the values of ‘sweetness and light’ against the threat posed by the advance of ‘philistinism’, it was within this tradition that the Leavises made their ...”

“... disegno at naught. At the end of the century a good judge could see nothing in Caravaggio’s St Matthew pictures but ‘the thought of Giorgione’. The mysterious avant-gardism and the impression of a Lombard current flowing strongly towards the future are due to the fact that Venice and the Veneto offered to European painting the 17th-century revolution ...”