“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them ideal candidates for the part of the first savages to be ennobled by their defeat. In 1547, a young boy from Tenerife was shipped to Paris by the Spanish and given to the French court as a present. His name was Petrus Gonzales, and to the exoticism of his place of origin was added a hereditary condition that made him a natural curiosity. Gonzales was ...”

“... includes prints based on drawings by ‘the best Masters’ of the day, artists such as Francis Barlow and the French academicians Charles Le Brun and Le Clerc) while framing the task as fundamentally accessible: ‘Made easier to the comprehension of Beginners than any book of this kind hitherto made publick.’ The copy from 1755 I looked at had ...”

“... of William Pynchon. She also accused him of bewitching a cow belonging to Pynchon’s servant Francis Pepper. Another of Pynchon’s servants, Thomas Miller, cut his leg with a saw and immediately assumed that Parsons was responsible. Up to this point, Mary had kept quiet about the fact that she had given herself to the devil and that her soul, leaving ...”

“... of the Lambs; his obsession with angels (he has an enormous one tattooed on his back) recalls Francis Dolarhyde’s sub-Blakean mysticism; and the shaving-off of all his body hair seems very much the sort of thing that one of Harris’s sexually-disoriented psychopaths would do. Above all, there is the emphasis on ...”

“... to rhetoric and the prosaic presentation has a special explanation. Victor Noir was a handsome young journalist shot after a quarrel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. The Prince was acquitted of murder, but the Republicans ensured that the plain facts were recorded in bronze. The work has been taken as an extreme example of a tendency in 19th-century sculpture ...”

“... it was found. We enter upon the early history of intelligence testing. We meet eugenists like Sir Francis Galton and his successor and biographer, Karl Pearson and the now infamous Sir Cyril Burt and a cast of fellow travellers. Even Sidney Webb cagily voiced eugenical arguments while remaining a committed environmentalist. We encounter the first steps ...”

“... in private or without announcement were ‘clandestine’, valid but punishable. When married, young people became independent householders with authority, obligations and social credit. William Gouge observed that by marriage ‘men and women are made husbands and wives. It is the only lawful means to make them fathers and mothers. It is the ordinary ...”

“... magically powered comic-book heroes hurtle, fist-first, into space. Among avant-garde painters, Francis Bacon has been most interested in the potential of foreshortening to endow human bodies with unstable and melting forms. In this he can resemble Correggio. But Bacon, generally looking from above, emphasises the torso, a rubbery mass into which heads sink ...”

“... her glass with embarrassment. The joke, Wollheim explains, is that the painting ‘represents a young aspirant whore coolly bidding up the price for her favours, while the beady-eyed madame of the brothel looks on with simulated indifference’. Comparison with other paintings and with captioned prints of the period does suggest that this is indeed a scene ...”