“... longueurs. His detective is a marginal presence, cohabiting in Pooterish domesticity with a nice young man. Ackroyd doesn’t burden his narrative with the tedium of a convincing topography, or nostalgia for the lost decencies. He’s busy, with this Post-Modern Sweeney Todd, reviving the shilling shocker – which, thanks to the confusion of the current ...”

“... to Adonis after their night of love. Titian himself, in his letter to Philip, congratulated the young prince on becoming King of England and drew his attention to the posture of Venus: in his previous Poesia, the scarcely less sensuous Danae was seen from the front; this time, he wanted to vary the composition ‘and show the other side’.While Philip was ...”

“... two-party politics now has to accommodate. The UK electorate is split between the old and the young, the educated and the less educated, the metropolitan and the provincial, the urban and the rural. The two main parties increasingly resemble loose coalitions of different interest and identity groups, each with its own axe to grind, and primarily united by ...”

“... famed for his heroism. Barry had, so the story goes, rescued forty or more travellers, including a young boy almost frozen in an ice cave whom he licked back to warmth. Visitors objected that Barry was not what they expected him to look like, so his legs were lengthened, his head raised and a barrel of brandy put around his neck to match the Landseer ...”

“... loading them onto horses and carts and repurposed ploughs. People took whatever they could find. Francis Saveer, a mason, boarded the ship and managed to extract a piece of silk, eighteen rows of buttons, a jacket and a waistcoat. His servant took ‘two old jerkins and some old shirts’, which Saveer’s wife ‘threw away so soon as they were brought ...”

“... Britain. A related and even more influential theme was sounded by Darwin’s younger half-cousin, Francis Galton. After reading the Origin of Species, Galton concluded that human beings were still evolving like all other animal species, but that the most likely basis of future human evolution would be inherited intellectual and psychological ...”

“... may be thought to have gone out of him once it became obvious that he was not going to die young. Wells’s most famous imaginative device, the time machine, is relevant to this, since the Time Traveller is in effect cheating death by voyaging forward in another dimension. Did Wells himself make some such jump into hyperdrive, becoming a prophet of the ...”

“... of ghosts themselves. In the 1940s a vicar reported that he had been embraced by a ‘naked young woman’: in earlier days this wouldn’t have been admitted to the record of the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, on moral grounds if on no other. Finucane concludes that the suffering souls of purgatory are more understandable, not as ...”

“... of a Bulgarian count whose recreation was to ride to hounds after a human quarry, preferably a young gypsy woman with a child at her breast. The hunt would end with the count coming to orgasm as he watched woman and baby being torn to pieces. Finally ‘everything was silent and the waters of the estuary turned carnation-red as the hounds ate their ...”

“... end of history simply contribute another event to the history they declare over and done with, as Francis Fukuyama has no doubt been discovering from his post-bag. They are self-disconfirming prophecies, Cretan Liar paradoxes which, like all appeals to make it new, add one more item to that venerable lineage known as the avant-garde. Besides, you can only ...”

“... understood. He is the first, I believe, to draw attention to some curious dealings between Captain Francis Austen and the directors of the East India Company and he notes that Austen’s career did not suffer thereby: yet he recognises that the Admiralty and the Company then cooperated in a manner that might later have been thought improper. He deals fairly ...”

“... of Labour Market Experience of Youth. Starting in 1979, this survey has been tracking about 12,500 young Americans, following not only their family background, education, employment, marriage and child-bearing, but measuring their IQ. This unique resource enables our authors to show that IQ is a fairly good predictor of many social variables – educational ...”

“... the pureness, the quick observant vision, the ready sensibility, the devotedness’ of her work. Francis Jeffreys claimed that Hemans was the example of ‘female poetry’: the ‘tenderness’ and ‘ethereal purity of sentiment’ he saw in her ‘could only emanate from the soul of woman’. ‘I never saw any one so exquisitely feminine,’ Jewsbury ...”

“... This question has provoked intellectual disagreement for over a century, beginning in 1884 with Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius, continuing through the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and culminating in the loudest recent salvos, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell ...”

“... dramatised Harrison’s relations with younger scholars – notably, D.S. MacColl, R.A. Neil and Francis Cornford – as painful scenarios in which she was always the loser. Yet Harrison, too, was inclined to see herself as repeatedly betrayed and heartbroken. Beard is uncomfortable with her claims to victim status, and hurries over these unedifying ...”