“... queen’ until her death in 1252, leaving the king’s wife, Margaret, to be described as ‘the young queen’. Blanche’s early regency was not, as far as we know, ever formally ended. When Louis went crusading in 1248 he made his mother regent again. Blanche’s background in the Spanish reconquista might explain a lot of her son’s behaviour. His ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... vehicles for scientific and technological speculation, for example in the fantasies of flight of Francis Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac, the amazing John Wilkins and the anonymous Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), on whose descriptions of a flying people encountered by a shipwrecked sailor near the South Pole Warner dwells with particular relish. She ...”

“... property developers, bent politicians and financial cowboys who made Fred Goodwin look like Francis of Assisi. The nation had screwed up again. Ireland is renowned for two industries: Guinness and Joyce. A good deal of the country’s labour over the years has been devoted to the task of generating fantasies and rendering the population ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... progresses. What Auerbach makes very clear at the outset is that the Exhibition (the brainchild of Francis Whishaw, of the Society of Arts) was never a spontaneous, universally demanded, enterprise. Tremendous opposition had to be worn down. The project attracted as many naysayers, doomwatchers, cranks and smokers-out of jobbery as ever opposed the Millennium ...”

“... anti-hero, Buckram, through the alleys. Martin portrays Samuel Johnson’s black servant, Francis Barber, as ‘a nouveau-riche social climber’, and both Sancho and Equiano are depicted in suitably unheroic fashion. Sandhu loves all this, though the passages he quotes don’t quite live up to his extravagant praise. But then Sandhu’s literary ...”

“... stereotypers, from Lavater’s new science of physiognomy to Linnaeus’s animal taxonomies, from Francis Galton’s physical measurements of ‘deviants’ to Lombroso’s infamous inquiries into the typical criminal cranium. (Today’s standard line on criminals is the reverse of this sham science, though just as suspect: the latest cliché is that ...”