“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... John Deakin took sixty years ago of the ‘School of London’ and Colony Room members Freud, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach together at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho. Paul wanted to conjure the power of that boys’ gang and express her own uneasy position vis-à-vis this now auratic company. ‘I belong among them,’ she ...”

“... a man (so Andrew Lang remarked) ‘talking angrily and vehemently to himself’. When he was still young, Carlyle confessed in his notebooks that the world had lost its solidity for him. ‘I attend to few things as I was wont: few things have any interest for me; I live in a sort of waking dream.’ When his belief fails, which means when transcendentalism ...”

“... the screen Nazi he had once or twice played in his early days as an actor; he was a scaled down Francis L. Sullivan, managing nevertheless to be surprisingly successful in finding partners. Not invariably, though. Sometime in the 1970s he was in a New York bath house where the practice was for someone wanting a partner to leave the cubicle door open. This ...”

“... a necklace, the Heart of the Ocean, that went down with the ship but found instead a sketch of a young woman wearing it. She contacts the expedition’s leader and tells him that she is that woman. Today for between $549.99 and $799.99 (on eBay) you can buy a reproduction of the fictional necklace made soon after the film came out; or you can buy a ...”

“... ever bother to bury saints in the first place? Father used to joke that if all the limbs of St Francis of Asissi claimed as relics had really belonged to him, he would have been a millipede. And below the cathedral, there was the grey main street, the cloudy café owned by the Italian family called Bimbi, the old cinema whose carpets had always been ...”

“... In between, most of the 15 or more versions have been made by men. The best-known of them are Francis Steegmuller and Gerard Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further question ...”

“... educational institutions of Manila, and soon afterwards in Europe. By the 1870s, a small, young mestizo intelligentsia – the so-called ilustrados – was coming into existence. And it was through this younger generation, attending the same schools, reading (and writing for) the same young Spanish-language ...”

“... Burundi. On the way, I’m stopped at numerous Hutu roadblocks. The barriers are manned mostly by young people with clubs, hammers or machetes. At one, a small boy is holding a nail-studded cudgel with tufts of bloody hair. The smell of putrefying bodies by the roadside is sickening. The starter of my dilapidated car is defective and the militiamen lay down ...”

“... front, outside the windscreen, the camera slightly off to the driver’s left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger seat, is asleep. Joe Pesci, in the back seat, is nodding off. A thumping noise is heard, and Liotta says, ‘Jimmy.’ De Niro wakes up. Liotta continues: ‘Did I ...”

“... the white-walled earth kiln ran into technical difficulties with her presentation. Karen Russo, a young Israeli artist, had developed a fascination with William Lyttle, the so-called ‘Mole Man’ of Hackney. Lyttle, talked up by estate agents promoting the auction of the ruined shell of his former house, a gothic property wedged like a ghost ship in the ...”

“... them with concern – was recognisably the same person of whom Jim Prior complained to Hugo Young in 1981: ‘She hasn’t really got a friend left in the whole cabinet. One reason she has no friend is that she subjects everyone to the most emotionally exhausting arguments; the other is that she still interrupts everyone all the time. It makes us all ...”

“... sitting by the fire during the damp Irish nights, he liked to tell us boys – my sister was too young to listen – anecdotes about Parnell, whom he admired; and tales of junks and pirates, in which he escaped from brigands or captured prizes. Such images were too vivid to last, their over-bright tints fading into the dimness of nursery-stories that ...”