“... Ertegun (‘What radio station is gonna play this crap?’).The album ended up in the hands of a young David Toop. Unspooling its peculiarly effective mixture of sideshow fraudulence, oneiric hokum and deeply coded, deadly serious New Orleans folklore on a mono Dansette in a friend’s bedroom – a device that was hardly up to deciphering ‘the ...”

“... Hoffmann at his death; the score now to be completed by a singularly unattractive and difficult young genius named Hulda Schnakenburg (‘Twaddlesville’?), who will thereby earn her PhD in Music. To help things along, the famous and redoubtable musicologist. Dr Gunilla Dahl Soot, is brought in as an adviser – surely bringing coals to Newcastle, for all ...”

“... mobilisation on the scale of the Second World War will be necessary. Many people, especially the young, have seen enough; like Wallace-Wells, they demand that others, especially those with the power to act, start to respond too. The pepper-spraying of Extinction Rebellion protesters in Paris in June and the claim by the former head of British ...”

“... sleepwalking (which happens during non-REM sleep) and also from night terrors – so common in young children as to be normal. There is an overlap between these conditions and the recurring nightmares that afflict some sufferers of post-traumatic stress. If you’re severely sleep-deprived you may experience vivid dreams as you drift off or wake up ...”

“... literary editor of the New Statesman and he was the paper’s jazz critic – known to his fans as Francis Newton – and a regular book reviewer. He was presently to move into full ‘synoptic power’, in Neal’s expression, working away at his serial account of the 20th century and its surrounding decades. No one ...”

“... already measured up for size: no question, ever, of anything being cropped. One was of the writer Francis Wyndham, then in his sixties, in conversation with a 34-year-old Alan Hollinghurst. It was an extraordinary portrait, the two absolutely at ease but sitting at an angle to each other and looking quizzical. Hollinghurst, clean-shaven and ...”

“... for the present at any rate. It’s the first time in my life ... that it’s happened.’ Then a young actress called Selma Vaz Dias sought her out and asked her permission to perform an adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight. Jean was renewed, revivified; she fired off long letters to Selma about her script, and wrote: ‘I am really very grateful to you ...”

“... no more than what I have heart from himself) was born of mean Parentage in Devonshire, and had Francis Russel (afterwards Earl of Bedford) for his Godfather, who, according to Custome, gave him his christen name. Whilest he was yet a Child, his Father, imbracing the Protestant Doctrine, was called in question by the Law of the Six Articles, made by King ...”

“... In 1989 the National Interest, an American journal, published an article by Francis Fukuyama called ‘The End of History’. It was reprinted around the world in a buzz of discussion. Was Fukuyama right to claim that the End of Communism spells the End of History? Not many people thought that he was. Now we have the book of the article, weighing in at around four hundred pages ...”

“... The ethnonym is first mentioned in a 1799 survey of communities in Myanmar by a Scottish botanist, Francis Buchanan, but then, save for sporadic mentions over the next two hundred years, it disappears from records. No census carried out by the British during its 124 years of rule mentions the name. Despite the fact that the post-independence government of U Nu ...”

“... stairs across the road that led To the metamorphic forest – which Bettelheim has found To be the young imagination’s vital proving-ground. I read a lot, I read and read. My God I did.     Now it occurs to me to wonder why? There is one fact that I’ve so far omitted,     Which is, I had a sister. By and by     We knew that one day she was ...”

“... Violent repression had helped put an end to the last nationwide uprising, in 2007. But this time, young people from a broad cross-section of society – students, labourers, bankers, civil servants, sailors, even soldiers – began to leave towns and cities for the rural border regions where ethnic forces opposed to the state have long been based. At training ...”

“... one of its captains embarking for the Gold Coast in 1651, and also ‘buy for us 15 or 20 young lusty negers of about 15 years of age, bring them home with you to London.’ Among the aristocracy and gentry, it had become fashionable to be waited on by dark-skinned boys and girls. A year after he admired Mingo’s dancing, Pepys noted in passing that ...”

“... him try to make sense of it, to explain it both to himself and his brother Sinbad (whom he calls Francis in moments of seriousness); – Can you hear them? Francis? – Yeah. That was all. I knew he wouldn’t say any more. We listened to the sharp mumbles coming up from downstairs. We did, not just me. We listened for a ...”

“... In The Other Garden Francis Wyndham manages a classic form, the first-person novella, with great delicacy and originality. His first person, as in his collection of short stories Mrs Henderson, is a gentle, helpful, observant boy growing up during the Second World War, a boy who is eventually bewildered by what human beings do to each other ...”