“... but she saw his usefulness and he saw a way of advancing his political career. The Radicals, as Francis Place wrote, ‘cared nothing for the queen as the queen’, but they rallied to her cause as a means of galvanising public opinion and focusing the discontent of the country at large. In this they were immensely successful. Soon William Cobbett was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... vice versa. She met Lucian Freud at a party given by Lady Rothermere. He was the beautiful untidy young man standing at the back next to Francis Bacon and booing loudly while everyone else clapped Princess Margaret’s execrable rendering of a Cole Porter medley. Here, nicely arrayed, are the components of the bohemian life ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a female. As it happens, the first 126 Sonnets are formally now described as addressing a ‘Fair Young Man’, perhaps aristocratic by birth: and some of them do indeed use male connotations for their subject, just as the last 28 poems plainly allude to a female. But the fact is that Sonnet 57 achieves its strenuous precision by telling us nothing ...”

“... of the United States are rich in cases of judges who have joined their customers in jail. (True, Francis Bacon in 1621 had to resign the Lord Chancellorship for taking bribes, but he explained engagingly that this had not meant that he necessarily gave judgment in favour of the donors. And Lord Chancellor Macclesfield was impeached and fined in 1725 for ...”

“... Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a worthwhile place to be is immensely heartening. The British Council can still be thought a bit of a joke but like the World Service it’s a more useful investment of ...”

“... The four essays the young Nietzsche wrote between August 1873 and July 1876 (as part of a larger project that was never completed) are linked by his concern over the state of German culture after the victorious conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War and the proclamation of the Reich at Versailles in January 1871. These Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, written while Nietzsche was Professor of Classical Philology at Basle, are here translated as Unmodern Observations by different hands, under the editorship of Professor William Arrowsmith of Boston University ...”

“... bad luck to it!’ Part of the trouble was Erasmus’s failure to appreciate overtures from Francis I promising a lucrative professorship. But Erasmus and Budé made it up, more or less. Why were Renaissance letter-writers so indiscreet? Their letters show that their message-bearers and servants were feckless, inclined to tipple or get into wrong ...”

“... up literary criticism!’ Fania Pascal, who was teaching Russian to Wittgenstein and his friend Francis Skinner, was delighted by being elected to the Cambridge Committee of the Friends of the Soviet Union, and imparted the good news to them. Wittgenstein told her firmly that political work would do her great harm: ‘What you should do is to be kind to ...”

“... for the big kill, was not frowning. Summers also wants to believe that someone introduced the young Michelangelo to the 12th Olympic Discourse of Dio Chrysostom. He even suggests that this work moulded the young sculptor’s ‘character and aspirations’, and all because he detects some faint echoes of it half a ...”