“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pure gold.’ Nevertheless, he orders his sidekicks to shoot her son Bailey, his wife, their two young children and their newborn baby. As gunfire sounds in the woods, the Grandmother cries: ‘You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the ...”

“... a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange house’, adding enigmatically: ‘Essie knitted ...”

“... admitted to several known unknowns in her counterfactual history, but was certain that ‘the young Elizabeth Stuart would have made an excellent queen, with her intelligence, charm and sense of ceremonial’ already evident, despite her being only nine years old when the Gunpowder Plot was discovered. Dramatic speculations irresistibly attach to the ...”