“... up a good fight. It’s not surprising to learn that Hughes especially admired the paintings of Francis Bacon, with their spattered bodies twisting about and screaming defiantly despite their homely prisons. As one of Hughes’s poems has it, ‘Life is Trying to be Life’; but then, as the poem continues, ‘Death also is trying to be life.’ Who will ...”

“... that make the most exciting showing at the Academy. Though he worked in Scotland as a boy and a young man, and later pioneered the tours of Wales that became such a standby for artists in search of the picturesque and sublime, his real heartland was – at least on the showing of this exhibition – the Home Counties: Windsor, Virginia Water, Luton Hoo, the ...”

“... splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum ...”

“... trinkets in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’; you see it, later, in the proêmes of Francis Ponge, where he celebrates the endomorphic thingliness of things, the way their sheer material facticity breaches the limits of every attempt to contain them conceptually or aesthetically; or in Wallace Stevens, in his plum that ‘survives its ...”

“... and decide the case, another of Somersett’s pro bono counsel, the legal scholar and antiquary Francis Hargrave, quoted Cartwright’s case in his argument (at least, he put it into the account of his argument in the report which he edited, admitting engagingly that it was not actually the speech he had delivered in court). But once the quotation was ...”

“... to be the inheritor of an esteemed ancient tradition – which in many ways it was. Outsiders like Francis Bacon, Tomasso Campanella and René Descartes liked to trumpet their novelty and to denigrate tradition. They used to be taken at their word by historians, but now we know better. The 16th century was a period of intensive urbanisation ...”

“... other ‘things’, is very deft. What would Clark make of Renoir’s Mademoiselle Lacaux or the Young Girl at the Piano (to cite two of his most exquisite paintings, one lent by Cleveland and the other by Chicago to the recent Hayward Gallery exhibition)? The handmade dress which is a foil for the clean and well-bred mademoiselle, and the mahogany ...”

“... had already made all the intellectual innovations that Burckhardt ascribed to the Renaissance. St Francis, not Petrarch, discovered Nature; scholastic philosophers like Nicole Oresme, not Leonardo da Vinci, devised the principles for a new natural science; Hugh of St Victor, not Pico della Mirandola, celebrated the dignity of man. Panofsky proved more than ...”

“... had a script, he believed in it – and he worked to get everything settled that he could. Freddie Francis (cinematographer): We met on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his first big film. I’d been making them for a long time, this film and that film, and Harry Salzman, the film’s producer, knew me well enough. So when Karel took on Saturday Night, Harry ...”

“... stir in him as well; and according to Bartlett, it was a story he particularly cherished. In it, a young man, a seminary student, is walking in a wood on a spring evening that has suddenly turned icily cold and gloomy. The change of weather impels him to think of the terrible Russian past, and of a present filled with poverty and hunger, ignorance, anguish and ...”

“... day in 1944, at Los Alamos, Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, called in the young physicist Luis Alvarez to ask him if there was some technological means to determine if the Germans were operating plutonium-producing reactors. Alvarez invented a filtering device to be carried in the nose of an aircraft to detect xenon-133, a gas emitted ...”

“... our social behaviour. The game? Nature v. nurture. That is a ‘convenient jingle of words’, as Francis Galton wrote in 1874, when he coined the dyad. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence that affects him after his birth. The distinction is clear: the one produces the infant such as it actually ...”

“... Caribbean well, and had visited the Panama region; Paterson himself had been in the Caribbean when young, though not in Darien. None of this seemed to count. Hope was what mattered. Paterson sold the Darien mirage to the company of Scotland, and the company sold it to the Scottish investors. The scheme had to succeed. In many Scottish minds, it had already ...”

“... call the dolce stil nuovo, the ‘sweet new style’ inflected by the Provençal troubadours. The young Dante exchanged sonnets and canzoni with fellow poets such as Guido Cavalcanti, each vying to surpass his peers in formal intricacy and praise of his lady. Their poetics required a donna angelicata, often more symbol than person. As a pretext for the ...”

“... someone else’s system. You don’t even have to supply the microphone.I decided to rewatch Francis Ford Coppola’s classic surveillance movie The Conversation (1974). During a virtuoso opening sequence, electronics wizard Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) eavesdrops on a couple who do their best to remain out of earshot by mingling with the crowd in San ...”