“... Phoenissae) the sections by Gascoigne have far more energy than those by his collaborator Francis Kinwelmersh. Eteocles drives out his brother Polyneices with ‘And now good sir, get you out of these walles,/Unlesse you meane to buy abode with bloude.’ Here, as often in Gascoigne’s verse, obtrusive alliteration flirts with flatness. A Hundreth ...”

“... to the public sphere, and are not helped towards any such commitment by the dead rhetoric of the young Parliament. Yet the problem is not the Parliament, it’s the people, and the people’s drowsy addiction to imagined injury – their belief in a paralysing historical distress – which makes the country assert itself not as a modern nation open to ...”

“... the purposes of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese ...”

“... the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual. ‘Travellers almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other people,’ Richie writes, and nowhere are they more avid in their screwing than in Japan. In the case of expat men, I would ...”

“... of 17, and his apartheid-era fiction often dwells on the horror of being a sensitive, usually gay young man in a culture of rough sports, red meat and white supremacism. ‘We’re men here, not girls,’ an officer snarls during the narrator’s military service in The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), and the narrator, who can’t catch a ball, feels a ...”

“... asked why they wanted to take my picture one of them emitted a little hissing laugh to himself. A young English assistant took us upstairs for lunch. On the way we passed a bank of slightly old-fashioned video screens with a control panel attached. I knew editing of the project was taking place in the building, but it wasn’t clear whether the screens were ...”

“... good. Wolff reflects on the spiritual link (as the late 18th century probably saw it) between a young genius and a revered master, and sets the tone of Lang’s Festschrift with some cogent remarks on the diplomat and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the ...”

“... as ‘philandering’ the latter down the Wye. Lady Oxford already had a liaison with Sir Francis Burdett, as she was later to have with Byron, and the paternity of her children was considered so doubtful that they became known as the Harleian Miscellany. Lady Holland wondered if the blame for Lady Oxford’s promiscuity should be traced back to ...”

“... might have been better selected; if the younger Sickert deserves any credence, a certain Francis E. James is one of the great painters of the 1890s, but maybe his works, like many others mentioned here, have sunk too deep in the historical oubliette to be retrieved. And then, one might complain that the sheer scholarly discretion of the editing ...”

“... with the debate over the future world order initiated by political scientists, most prominently Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. Unfortunately, both Fukuyama and Huntington grounded their prophecies on a schematic universal history of the sort liable to engender an allergic reaction in most historians. Whereas Fukuyama predicted that Communism’s ...”

“... They are good at causing skin infections and, occasionally, pneumonia, which quickly kills healthy young adults. Like EMRSA there are different kinds that have evolved from different progenitors, but all have SCCmec IV and a gene coding for the Panton-Valentine leucocidin toxin (PVL). PVL was discovered by two bacteriologists (Philip Panton and ...”

“... shared with the Leavises the founding of Scrutiny. ‘The high period of the journal,’ says Francis Mulhern in his book The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, ‘was that commanded by F.R. Leavis and the early graduates of Cambridge English, [D.W.] Harding, [L.C.] Knights, Q.D. Leavis and [Denys] Thompson – five authors who, in aggregate, wrote on virtually ...”

“... way: blank, rheumy-eyed, sick as the day was long. An unmerry child with St Vitus’ Dance, the young Warhol lay twitching in his bed under a blanket of fan magazines, the source of all his imaginary friendships – with Errol Flynn and Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and Gary Cooper – and the only thing he craved in those Pittsburgh days was the chance to ...”

“... American and other international versions of English (‘frontiersman’, for example, supplied by Francis Atkins, a New Mexico doctor), and he always viewed overtly nationalistic accounts of the OED’s purpose with suspicion. Murray aimed not just for completeness but to create a series of volumes that would record language as a living entity. As Ogilvie ...”

“... glade.’In the next room an opera singer began performing scales. I assumed, when I married so young, that I would eventually have a weird baby – albeit one whose eyes were the correct distance apart and whose legs were neither bowed nor knock-kneed. I thought perhaps the baby would have a lovely name and no trouble filling out forms at the dentist and ...”