“... and Letters (1979), a big book of specific questions posed by Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern, members of the editorial committee of New Left Review; and of answers, rarely as specific or pointed, offered by Williams. The second section of Politics and Letters includes detailed criticism of The Long Revolution and Williams’s response to ...”

“... Is there any in her novels?... Was Katherine simply mistaken in thinking she was pregnant by Francis Heinemann? Did she knowingly mislead L.M.? Or was she – against all medical probability – in fact with child.... How does someone who has no religious faith and is only 31 “accept” the imminence of death? How does anyone do that at 31? How does a ...”

“... as many obstacles as in The Shadow-Line but reaches a different and more wondrous conclusion (Francis Ford Coppola borrowed it for Apocalypse Now, his film version of Heart of Darkness). Touching shore at long last in the dark, Marlow wakes from the sleep of exhaustion to a silent dawn: I opened my eyes … and then I saw the men of the East – they ...”

“... be tactfully retrieved from service as paperweights and doorstops, chiefly thanks to the work of a young volunteer, Mary Porter, author of What Rome Was Built With (1907). Porter, whose formal education had been truncated by paternal edict, eventually studied crystallography in Germany. She returned to Oxford with a fellowship in the 1930s and helped revise ...”

“... I issued a Proclamation prohibiting the publishing of reports or writing on duels and appointed Francis Bacon as attorney general, inviting him to put a stop to the practice. Bacon described the duel as a brutal urge for revenge dressed up in Italian ‘affections’. Honour, he argued, was an innate moral quality revealed by an individual’s ...”

“... in the story – the disappearing wife, the mysterious box with nothing in it, the sexually pliant young woman – will be familiar to readers of Murakami’s previous work. Echoes and uncanny recurrences feature prominently in his writing, so this shouldn’t be surprising, but the story still feels a little tired, as if Murakami himself is tired of reworking ...”

“... a Monk that was believed to be by him was acquired for the Louvre. Numerous artists, including the young Manet, registered requests to copy it. Then, in the following year, the same museum bought the Réunion de portraits, a much acclaimed acquisition, of which Manet made a copy, probably later in the decade (both original and copy are in the exhibition). It ...”

“... views about exactly how much gratitude the Roman people owed Cicero. Lucius Sergius Catilina was a young aristocrat, and – like many of his peers – he was deeply in debt, as well as frustrated by failure to win election to the political offices he thought his due. Through various underground sources Cicero learned by the late summer of 63 that Catiline was ...”

“... see it,’ he wrote, ‘would think our Western Monks had hence borrowed their Ceremonies.’ Francis Xavier – whose source was an accommodating, illiterate, renegade Japanese wanted for murder, whom he met in Malacca in 1547 – initially believed that the Buddha was not an idol but, like Moses, had ordered the smashing of idols in the name of the One ...”

“... well in the 1960s, Carter saw her status go, as she put it, ‘from being a very promising young writer to being completely ignored in two novels’. At this distance those novels, the dystopian fantasies Heroes and Villains and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, as well as The Passion of New Eve which followed, may seem like ...”

“... response to his work: they’ve attenuated the sensationalism, far more so than with the art of Francis Bacon, whom he admires and emulates. It’s as if the works themselves have swallowed all the barbiturates and decongestants displayed in those gleaming cabinets. So many of them have become iconic that they now wear a classical, self-important air. Hirst ...”

“... didn’t think he could be murdered in cold blood inside his church. Significantly, the new Pope Francis has reopened the case for his canonisation. If it is successful Romero will be recognised officially as a martyr. But he did not intend to die. The most eloquent witnesses of all are the survivors, who can raise their voices to confront the forces that ...”

“... from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was discreet, especially compared to the most prominent New York salonnier of the 1920s, Carl Van Vechten, who shamelessly made sure his name was associated with those he helped. Thayer had some literary ...”

“... of Cambridge on the first laws, the FA ruled against most forms of handling and all hacking. Francis Campbell, a Blackheath player, walked out in dismay and, as Smith writes, ‘took rugby union with him’. In fact, it wasn’t long before hacking, thought to be a manly, character-building part of the game, disappeared from both codes. The Rugby game in ...”

“... Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could find enough of them.) One anonymous writer, here rescued from oblivion, divined that Eliot’s aim ...”