“... which is famous. He said: ‘I used to have a very strong voice. Years ago, when I was very young, there was a big meeting in the Town Hall. Bankim Babu’ (the great Bengali novelist) ‘was in the chair and all the best speakers were speaking. I had to speak and it strained my voice in that hall. When I had finished, the people insisted I should sing ...”

“... For if Spials be lawful against lawful Enemies, much more against Conspirators and Traytors. Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of Henry VII One of the benefits of the contemporary fascination with the world of intelligence operations is the growing perception that this ‘missing dimension’ which lies behind so many newspaper headlines lies ...”

“... at Owen’s College in Manchester, ‘what kinds of habits &c I had to overcome when I was young & thinking of speaking to others.’ But he took pains to learn, and to fashion a suitable character for his performances. Dignified, unostentatious, unforced, he became the handsome, masculine face of Victorian public science, a gentleman who could command ...”

“... standardisation in 1960s Scottish girlhoods. Platignum Pens and the Burns Federation. Busy books, Francis Gay, Opportunity Knocks with Neil Reid. Dogs of all sorts, but mainly collies. Collies are the best. Chips fried in lard you’d leave to solidify for the next time, until it got so many ‘bits’ in it you had to throw it out; olive oil for earwax, not ...”

“... the common experience of many working-class households with a preponderance of very old or very young members – an insight that contributed to the New Liberal pension and insurance schemes passed before the First World War. Renwick does pause to mention other developments – educational reform, child welfare measures – but these three themes dominate ...”

“... ethnicity and whatever the quality of the dynasty’s representative at any given moment. Emperor Francis I would never have been chosen as a leader by any electoral body. Keates opens his book with the story of the Bandiera brothers. Italian officers in the Austrian navy, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera became fervent patriots, tried to lead an insurrection and ...”

“... it got just 28 per cent. But even in 1987, with party political videos to remind the nation that Young Upwardly-Mobile Kinnocks – ‘Yuk-kies’, Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil Kinnock had said that to ‘lose badly’ was to come in with less than 250 seats. The Party won just 229. The ...”

“... line of dramatic burlesque, at the version of the interview between Hamlet and Ophelia supplied by Francis Talfourd’s Hamlet Travestie (1834): Hamlet (aside): (But soft! hold hard! I’m growing spoony, so must try the mad dodge!) To a Nunnery go! ...          (Hamlet sings wildly) She wore a sky-blue walrus in her pewter chemisette; Her wooden ...”

“... J.G. Lockhart, John Wilson, Walter Scott, William Maginn, Allan Cunningham, William Blackwood, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Cockburn – are evoked, not as ciphers for their works but as bullish personalities. What Miller values most in Hogg’s fiction – its ‘intentness on a real, visible, palpable, smellable Scotland’ – is triumphantly exhibited in ...”

“... The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper (1995). This indicts a ferocious misogynist, Francis Tumblety (c.1833-1903), an American quack who peddled a patent medicine known as the Tumblety Pimple Destroyer. (He was arrested for complicity in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, was suspected in the Whitechapel murders, and was charged in November ...”

“... thought came to me: I’ve known rivers …The poem ends:I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the ...”

“... and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a national cast in the Manifesto. From the Marquis de Sade through Baudelaire and Rimbaud to ...”

“... I feel at least, that he [Sainte-Beuve] is a man of the past, of a dead generation; and that we young Americans are (without cant) men of the future… We are Americans born – il faut en prendre son parti. I look upon it as a great blessing; and I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. Five years later, he wrote to Charles ...”

“... Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry readings, a big new official ...”

“... only made public on Minnie’s 17th birthday in 1858, during which Edward supervised his young cousin’s education and demanded she come up to scratch as a correspondent (‘Minnie is a most affectionate creature but from her letters one could scarcely think so’), they were married in 1859. The wedding night and honeymoon, according to ...”