“... cynicism, of formidable cruelty.’ This is one of the rare moments when the translator Martin McLaughlin’s careful devotion to idiom and fluency lets him down. Nabokov was one of ‘the authors of these years’, but he wasn’t, in 1984, a ‘living author’, as McLaughlin calls him. The only other slip I found in this excellent version was ...”

“... the life of the city. Brougham served with the same gun in a company of artillery as Playfair, and Francis Horner walked the streets with a musket, being a private in the Gentlemen Regiment. As for Sir Walter Scott, he became the life and soul of the Edinburgh troop of the Midlothian Yeomanry Cavalry.’ The Northern Athens was classier than most British ...”

“... canes, ‘hounds of the Lord’. The other major grouping among the friars, the followers of Francis, also staffed inquisitions but, as Black points out, Franciscans rapidly lost their already minority share of the inquisitor market during the 16th century. So there were inquisitions long before there was the Inquisition. And in fact there never was ...”

“... in an almost desultory way, by Benny Goodman. ‘And now, Frank Sinatra …’ The 27-year-old Francis Albert Sinatra stepped up, and history turned a small corner. He was met by a tsunami of hysterical screams from a passel of young female fans. Goodman was initially thrown, completely struck dumb in fact, then looked over his shoulder and blurted ...”

“... too, and takes off on an extraordinary literary ramble from which it never returns and in which Francis Coppola and his team seem to have decided to do The Golden Bough as their Christmas pantomime. The confused ending weighs on the film but doesn’t wreck it, so we don’t need to hush up the confusion or pretend it isn’t confusion at all. Apocalypse ...”

“... in the colonies. In 1766, the Pennsylvania Gazette offered a reward for a 21-year-old Irishman, Francis Power, who had escaped from his employers. The men to whom he was indentured, Thomas Barnsley and Herman Vansant, described him as ‘a great lover of strong drink … marked with Indian ink or gunpowder on both arms’ and ‘under his shirt with the ...”

“... of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his life reconstructing the techniques with which Italian Renaissance artists analysed and represented the natural world: the science of art, as he once called it. He has a deep command of the specialised literature, and no one knows the ...”

“... that Sandby ‘did not get beyond topography and the mere tinted imitation of nature’; of Francis Jukes, on the other hand, Sandby’s friend and the engraver of some of his works, Redgrave wrote that he ‘began art as a topographical landscape painter, but by great perseverance raised himself to much distinction as an aquatint engraver’. Better to ...”

“... has never been ‘renowned as convivial company’. Has he ever dined with Mr Heath, one wonders? Francis Pym is criticised for ‘publishing a bitter book of self-justification’ immediately after being sacked as Foreign Secretary. That opinion would not survive even a cursory reading of The Politics of Consent. Yet Mr Horne is generally pretty fair, and he ...”

“... Cabinet of eunuchs. Geoffrey’s being taught his two times two on the Dame’s knee, Francis is being shown how to curtsy in drag, both of Willie’s Cumberland balls are on pawn in her handbag, and as for your boss little Peter, he’s rushing off to kiss the great Nigerian arse.’ The real problem for a novelist comes with the cast of living ...”

“... passes over. A specifically Jewish vein of it, stretching from Ernst Bloch and Gustav Landauer to Martin Buber and Herman Cohen, has recently been excavated by Russell Jacoby in Picture Imperfect.* Curiously, neither Jacoby nor Jameson mentions the latest Jewish thinker to inherit this tradition, Jacques Derrida. Theodor Adorno, whom Jameson does discuss, is ...”

“... remembered misquotation’), he mentions his surprise at being compared to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francis Ponge by reviewers of his first two books. It’s easy to see how they got there: The Mezzanine – Howie’s footnote-strewn account of a morning at his anonymous corporate workplace, defamiliarised by intricate descriptions of vending machines and ...”

“... had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not have been a man of genius.’ Too often, reviewing was an annex of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John ...”

“... for whom the mother had suffered so’, as they show him off on discharge day. When her husband, Francis, visits, without a nightdress or flowers or even soft words, and confesses that he had thought of handing their children over to his mother in Nigeria if she had died in childbirth, she exploded:I hate you now, ...”

“... Hootenanny Singers; Agnetha Fältskog as a teen ingénue inspired by the American singer Connie Francis; and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, or Frida, as a budding chanteuse singing jazz standards in touring bands. The boys had met on Sweden’s ‘folkpark’ circuit in 1966 and quickly started writing songs together, encouraged by their soon-to-be manager and label ...”