“... 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 ...”

“... left-wing party, the PSOE, and the coalition government headed by Pedro Sánchez, its leader. Pope Francis had died a couple of days earlier, on Easter Monday, and the group spoke about the abiding power of the Church over Spanish education, healthcare and finance. They described the religious parades of Easter week as annual rituals of cultish ...”

“... slabs of cooked meat but never to swallow them. He later claimed this volume had been inspired by Francis Bacon’s paintings. The brutal way of regarding his own body, prefigured in the suggestively titled La Mort propagande, was fully developed only in his last Aids books. A collection of Guibert’s photographs, Le Seul Visage, begins with a startling ...”

“... as typical – ‘he’s fucking her and she’s/Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm’. The young people’s pre-Aids freedom from moral constraints, assessed with brutality but also an angry humour, sets them down in ‘paradise’ – at least in the envious eyes of ‘everyone old’ watching ‘everyone ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie.’ Cavell, whose own ‘odd education’ took place in part at the Berkeley cinemas where Kael worked as a programmer, put it in more positive terms: ‘To be drowning in the ...”

“... has never been ‘renowned as convivial company’. Has he ever dined with Mr Heath, one wonders? Francis Pym is criticised for ‘publishing a bitter book of self-justification’ immediately after being sacked as Foreign Secretary. That opinion would not survive even a cursory reading of The Politics of Consent. Yet Mr Horne is generally pretty fair, and he ...”

“... that so simple a molecule could specify genetic information, but its role became clear when Francis Crick and Jim Watson in Cambridge determined its three-dimensional structure. Their famous double helix showed how the genetic information is written on DNA and how it is copied every time a cell divides. Some years after this, scientists also deciphered ...”

“... two hundred and fifty men led by a clutch of ‘spies, scholars, soldiers, sailors and well-born young blades’. After flattening the Trinidad settlement, where Berrio was preparing to re-enter Guiana, he rescued five local chieftains ‘almost dead from famine, and wasted with torments’ and broadcast to an admiring population the discourse which was to ...”

“... New York, bizarre conjunctions, an affair with Lady Q., a bit of bohemian life in London – ‘In Francis Bacon’s queer after-hours club’ – and one Pericles Belleville. At a very formal dinner party, At which I met the woman I have loved the most In my life, Belleville Pulled out a sterling silver-plated revolver And waved it around, pointing it at ...”

“... but also ‘at William and Mary, at Pennsylvania, at Yale, at King’s, and at Harvard, the young men who rode off to war in 1776 had been trained in the texts of Scottish social science’ (Fame and the Founding Fathers). But from 1800 onwards the influence of the Scottish moral philosophy increased enormously. Moral philosophy had the key place in the ...”

“... is instructive to compare it with that masterpiece of invention, Larkin’s poem on looking at a young girl’s photograph album.’ The comparison isn’t made, so the instruction is hypothetical, but Bayley’s general patience is clarified by what it has to put up with in Ashbery’s Shadow Train. Bayley has defended his criteria in several other ...”

“... foreign was an experience he could not explain, when he witnessed a public copulation between a young man and girl orchestrated by the social élite of the island. Cook admitted to thinking that it was done not out of ‘lewdness’ but out of ‘custom’. That was dangerous. He was admitting that something was different, not necessarily evil, and there ...”

“... myself’ – that is, bare her arms and upper bosom in public, like all those duchesses and young beauties, ‘at my age after being muffled up so many years!’ Mr C. was peremptory: ‘Eve he supposed had as much sense as I had and she wore no clothes at all!!!’ A white silk dress was duly ordered (Mr C. graciously agreed to pay) and arrived ...”

“... it wrong most of the time.’ O’Connor’s best-known characters – Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, Francis Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away – are embodiments of that predicament or struggle. They wander in a wilderness of the spirit. They are in a constant and desperate search for grace. Here is Tarwater, towards the end of the novel:He remained ...”