“... spontaneously delivered out side 10 Downing Street on her election in 1979: the prayer of St Francis of Assisi, beginning: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony’ – a sentiment which many have found an ironic epigraph for her premiership. This kind of preparation became her standard procedure, for spontaneous asides as well as big ...”

“... pride. As the Irish nation wallowed in its ‘liberation’, a Jesuit priest called Father Francis Shaw submitted an essay to the Jesuit journal Studies which contained what Roy Foster calls a ‘swingeing exposé of lacunae in [Patrick] Pearse’s ideology’. The piece was not published for six years. The editors felt that Ireland was not ready for a ...”

“... and precise, must have seemed utterly counterintuitive, appearing as it did only five years after Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’. Fukuyama argued with a seductive confidence that liberal democracy was here to stay, that in this sense the great struggles of human history had come to an end. Oh no, they haven’t, Luttwak retorted.According to ...”

“... is, transported to Australia. Oliver’s role was exposed by the Leeds Mercury, and retold by Sir Francis Burdett in the House of Commons (Sidmouth ‘abused Oliver for a great fool for being detected’), but the operation was another successful exercise in sending shivers down the spines of the respectable classes and in justifying further acts of ...”

“... more remote than ever. After Carrington resigned he was briefly succeeded at the Foreign Office by Francis Pym, until Thatcher won her crushing victory in the 1983 election and replaced him with Geoffrey Howe. He stayed for six years until he was kicked sideways and then, in his quietly devastating resignation speech in November 1990, precipitated Thatcher’s ...”

“... his MA, and soon left for the Continent, where he appears to have acted as tutor to a wealthy young man. (On the other hand he may have entered his brother-in-law Edmund Popple’s trading-house.) When he returned to England in 1647 his political sympathies were apparently royalist. Though he was soon to change his views, the best readings of his poetry ...”

“... the Malayalam inscription on a stone commemorating a 17th-century Jesuit bishop, Archbishop Francis Roz. The church is of the branch of St Thomas Christians which accepted the Roman liturgy introduced by the Portuguese; the ‘Jacobites’, who clung to the old Syrian rites, have a separate church in town. ‘We are loyal to Rome,’ he says ...”

“... read at West Point, profiled by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, heralded by Newsweek as the ‘Francis Fukuyama of al-Qaida’ and by CNN as ‘the most dangerous terrorist you’ve never heard of’. The ‘architect of global jihad’ seems to have been discovered by the umma and the Great Satan at roughly the same time. Lia, a Norwegian scholar of ...”

“... of river and two gas stations, nothing you could call a town, had nonetheless caused two groups of young men to come into proximity – one shirtless and black and drinking beer, the other shirtless and white and selling Confederate flag patches and 9/11 keepsakes. We filled the tank at a station frequented exclusively by black customers, and looked across a ...”

“... When, at the beginning of the canto, ‘self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,’ the young hero finds himself, not coincidentally, ‘upon this place of skulls,/The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo’. Why not glimpse personal calamity in a generation’s burial place? (‘He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward ...”

“... cabinet secret. There is no tomorrow. But Mme de T–– had not expected to tangle with the young chevalier and now her real lover (stalking the shadows of the story) has been cuckolded. Something has changed, and not even Mme de T–– can claim to control the workings of circumstance. It is a libertine truth that you cannot rehearse a ...”

“... salons Paulette hosted in her Paris flat Lanzmann met every famous person from Cocteau to the poet Francis Ponge. His friends at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he enrolled as a boarder, were no less impressive. Jean Cau, later Sartre’s secretary, shared his anger at a student protest in support of the Fascist writer Robert Brasillach, on trial for ...”

“... I asked her.‘Packed,’ she said. ‘The workers and the schoolkids, just by.’‘Where do the young people go for nights out?’ Karl said.She looked at him as if human nature were always biting at her heels. ‘You could go to Glasgow,’ she said, ‘but it would cost you a fortune to get back in a taxi. Even to get to Hamilton costs £22. But there’s ...”

“... art creates its own reality and issues no passports. This swirling, uplifting work (its oak kept young and vital by varnish) may also realise Brancusi’s sole intention, ‘to bring joy’, and he’s abetted by its accessibility, a vexing issue in regard to Modernism’s afterlife. How often is Ulysses read beyond the classroom? Have you ever noticed how ...”

“... did feel so at one time – about Michael Fried?Well, one is avid for heroes when one’s young; especially among one’s contemporaries. Everybody has memories of that. Somebody like Francis Hope, for example, who died young in an aircrash, used to dazzle me with his ...”