“... near a little village of Peru, and made a voyage to England in an ingot, under the convoy of Sir Francis Drake’; the shilling’s later adventures include being exchanged for a shoulder of mutton, and getting clipped by a counterfeiter. The 18th century witnessed a mania for ‘it-narratives’, tales told from the perspective of money, corkscrews, lapdogs ...”

“... in ticket sales, the largest US gross that year. Still, there was a vague sense that frisky young Prince – the latest reincarnation of the R’n’B acts the Stones venerated and in some sense owed their existence to – was being used as a heart-starter, to angry up the old (thirtysomething) troupers’ blood. As Jason Draper puts it in Prince: Life ...”

“... Brick Lane brewery to celebrate the organisation which had, in the words of its current chairman (Francis Carnwarth, the personable banker who took over from Mark Girouard), ‘saved 18th-century Spitalfields’. There were warm memories from the early days of art-historical activism: the squats and sit-ins which the Trust’s members undertook as they ...”

“... tradition of science as wholly inadequate to the serious advancement of scientific knowledge. As young men now applied themselves to the study of law, he argued, future scientists must devote themselves to the mastery of their respective disciplines. Responding to the call of Babbage and others for a new professionalism in the sciences, researchers and ...”

“... of which H. sap can conceive remain unfulfilled,’ but Reading is more like Betjeman than Francis Bacon, and he convinces you that he is neither subconsciously attracted to the degradations he describes nor writing from the standpoint of ‘beetrooty colonels’ who want ‘to get this Great Country back on its feet’. A difficult balancing act, but ...”

“... stopped in Egypt to see the sights and was observed to gaze for a long time at the Sphinx: ‘Francis Worsley commented that she probably couldn’t make head nor tail of him.’ MacNeice’s problem, in the words of his BBC colleague Jack Dillon, was that he was an introvert trying to be an extrovert. He badly needed to feel he belonged to a group, and ...”

“... how many doesn’t matter) dissolve into ‘billet-doux’, texts so much more sacred to a young woman in the age of Queen Anne than all those dreary epistles from the apostles – and the word ‘Bibles’ virtually has a tag hovering above it which says ‘Smile at the incongruity here.’ You do as you’re told of course, and smile. But a laugh ...”

“... were subject to the same evolutionary laws, why not do this with them? Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton had created something of a splash in 1869 with his Hereditary Genius, purporting to correlate high achievement with particular bloodlines. In work by others inspired by Galton’s example, the easily transmitted cultural advantages of a social ...”

“... He was far beyond being influenced by his affections, and in writing as he did to the beautiful young novelist he was not for a moment influenced by the fact that he fancied her. Godwin was justified in writing these reproofs in part by his exceptionally clear-sighted and rational judgment of character, evident especially perhaps in his estimate of ...”

“... And time has not falsified yet Was always a love with three corners    I loved you in bed with young men, Your arousers and foils and adorers    Who would yield to me then. And so on, for 25 stanzas, unambiguous about the preferences of the parties, but also firm that the marriage was far from lacking in love. There were times when Hetta’s exercise ...”

“... After he died, in 1592, posthumous editions of the Essays were prepared by Marie de Gournay, a young intellectual and admirer of Montaigne’s who became his literary executor. Philippe Desan’s biography aims to debunk the familiar picture of Montaigne as an aristocratic sage in retirement. ‘The literary and philosophical constitution of the ...”

“... one looking straight at us. The most powerful figure is that of the mother, standing behind her young daughters, staring out of shot to our right with a brooding imperiousness. But the d’Orsay show also has many preliminary drawings for the painting, of which the fullest, dated c.1858-59, has the mother looking full-face towards us. Redirecting her ...”

“... tests had been done on the fragment.Further problems arose in the interim. A British scholar, Francis Watson, noticed that all but one of the phrases in the fragment appeared to have been borrowed from the Coptic Gospel of St Thomas, the exception being that showstopper: ‘my wife’. In itself this proved nothing, and in fact the sixth line also ...”

“... up the stairs to offer consultations to first Mr and then Mrs – he asked Milner to take on the young patient who would become known as Susan, who was then living in his house. It was bound to end in disaster, and it did. Susan had been rescued by Winnicott’s wife, Alice, from a psychiatric hospital where she had recently undergone two sessions of ...”

“... but when Ashley-Cooper’s protégé Thomas Hanmer gave instructions for an illustration to Francis Hayman in 1744 he was clear about the way the exiled magician’s home and its surroundings should look (rather like 18th-century parkland):A Landskip the most pleasing that can be design’d, varied with woods and plains and Rocks and vallies, and falls ...”