“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of how the three careers stirred the consciousness and conscience of the English-speaking young between 1920 and 1970 The ‘onlookers’ who made up these programmes were anything but marginal, and without the dimension of sound we have lost some of French’s original point. With what emotion did they recollect the hero of their youth? Were they ...”

“... in libraries, both private and public. The catalogue for Sensation, the show of works by young British artists from the Saatchi collection, currently on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, runs over two hundred pages, with more than a hundred colour plates, as well as a series of black and white portrait photographs of the artists taken ...”

“... to the Auld Alliance, Mary signed herself ‘Marie’ all her life. Had her first husband Francis II not died without producing an heir, ‘Scotland,’ Mackay concedes, ‘might have become a French appanage.’ Despite all this In My End Is My Beginning prefers to suggest that a misunderstood proto-liberalism was more responsible for the Queen’s ...”

“... at all; some of his readers are going to wish that his literary tastes had been formed less by Young’s Night Thoughts and Sherlock’s Sermons, more by Defoe, Smollett and the prints of Hogarth. But if he doesn’t equal Pepys or Boswell in vitality and curiosity, Turner has a powerful advantage over either of them, or indeed over perhaps any published ...”

“... on the ‘reinforcement principle’: never trust to just one link if more than one is feasible. Francis Frederick, Duke of Saxe-Coburg’s formidable brood of seven children built up two other important areas of dynastic influence by this means. One was an Austro-Hungarian connection, founded by Leopold’s elder brother Ferdinand’s marriage to the ...”

“... editions. (The poem mocks, among others, Thomas Moore, who became his friend, and the critic Francis Jeffrey, who became his champion.) He came back to London with two manuscripts in his luggage: Hints from Horace, a gentler sequel to English Bards, in which he leavens the satire with some literary advice, and Childe Harold. The first, which includes a ...”