“... 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 ...”

“... of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (reg. 1260-94). While his elders transacted their business, the young Marco ingratiated himself with the Great Khan thanks to his storytelling gifts. He had discovered that Kublai’s ambassadors bored him to tears with dull pragmatic reports of their journeys, when the cultivated ruler yearned for tales about the ‘wonders ...”

“... favourite then joined up with two courtiers, Endymion Porter (who had been born in Spain) and Sir Francis Cottington, and set sail for France on 19 February. They were thoroughly sick on the voyage. The small party was conspicuous enough to be identified by a group of German tourists outside Paris, so they took the precaution of buying periwigs to thicken ...”

“... told me you were dead’; he wrote the words of the ‘Eton Boating Song’; and in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust.’ Ten years later, Johnson was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... such an idle reprobate would provoke Johnson’s censure. But the lightly sketched portrait of young Minim appears in a journal whose title commits it to defending a life of easy wins, as long as that life cannot hurt anyone. The key lesson of Minim’s petty existence is that – however malicious his intentions – he remains innocent of damage. Johnson ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... posture. In Red Dragon, things naturally go wrong for Will Graham. He does catch the bad guy, one Francis Dolarhyde, who turns out to be the employee of a film-processing company: Graham twigs that he had developed film of both the families he had attacked. (Dolarhyde suffered from a cleft palate as a child; Harris is heroically un-PC about giving his baddies ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he had the bad luck to run headlong into the terror of the 1919 Bavarian Soviet republic; the young Bolsheviks who threatened and appalled him were for the most part Jews. He never entirely recovered, and from then on nursed a pathological hatred of Bolshevism – which he identified with Jews. To understand how important that experience was, one must ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”