“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... used more broadly to contextualise European colonialism. In 2021 Emmanuel Macron told a group of young Algerians that he was ‘fascinated’ by Turkey’s success in persuading their country that the French were its ‘only colonisers’ – a reference to Ottoman rule over North Africa, which began in the 16th century. Historians were quick to ...”

“... Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set ...”

“... present in the early Sartor Resartus, lively and opaque by turns, a book which inspired the young and bewildered their elders. A devastating social critic over-impressed by heroes and dictators, Carlyle was humane and savage, radical and racist, an agnostic quoted by churchmen and praised as ‘a prophet in the midst of an untoward generation’ in Dean ...”

“... for an evangelical missionary organisation, one of whose many purposes and functions was to train young people to spread the good news, organising them into small teams and sending them out among every nation, tribe and people in all Judea, to Go, then, to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples: baptise them in the name of the Father, the Son, and ...”