“... breakdown in communication which makes it impossible for Greuze to introduce a normal, virile young man into the family groups of which he was so fond. Bryson keeps some of his greatest surprises for his chapter on David, an artist whom he profoundly admires and who cannot therefore be allowed to be ‘discursive’, as the implications of the argument ...”

“... was the real Karl. Right now, columnist, game-show pundit and biographer of Tom Driberg, Francis Wheen is here to tell us that all the previous practitioners and theoreticians of Marx’s work – both the governments and the academics (in economics, history, geography, sociology, literature) who professed themselves Marxists – have ‘calamitously ...”

“... the red hat which I’d always thought by Carpaccio, but isn’t now, and also the Portrait of a Young Man by Baldassare Estense. I don’t care for Cosimo Tura, whom I usually find a sinister painter, the flesh and aspect of the living no much different from that of the dead; still, I like his funny little Pietà with the Virgin looking at the wounds in ...”

“... She set her sights on a man who had spent much of his life at court under her father’s guidance: Francis Stephen, who was nine years her senior and inherited the small duchy of Lorraine in 1729. He was persuaded – with some difficulty – to renounce his hereditary rights and the provincial charms of Nancy and Lunéville. In exchange, he was offered the ...”

“... expense of the social and intellectual milieu. All this is an old story. Now that works such as Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters (first published in 1963) and Michael Levey’s Painting at Court (1971) have made the social history of art respectable, it is becoming quite difficult to remember the time when it was virtually restricted, or ...”

“... in their twenties and snappily dressed, are the noble Jean de Dinteville, ambassador from King Francis I of France to Henry VIII, and his friend, perhaps alter ego, Georges de Selve, who had been given the small see of Lavaur near Toulouse to provide for a career in the royal service. Dinteville was in England from February to November 1533; de ...”

“... in the novel: although the Enemy is repelled, the first attack on New York seriously wounds the young man, and the city sequesters him away in the bowels of the subway system to recuperate. The birth of the city hasn’t gone according to plan, and as the Enemy regroups, New York respawns fivefold into new avatars, one for each borough. Their task is to ...”

“... whose feats did arouse overwhelming public sympathy and veneration. The findings of Martin Francis’s The Flyer, an illuminating if at times rather earthbound account of wartime and postwar Britain’s romance with the RAF, make more sense when seen in light of this wartime moral economy of sacrifice and suffering. Fighter pilots were despised by ...”

“... display of Swedish drill.’ Auden’s detective play has disappeared more thoroughly than Sir Francis Crewe, heir to the estate of Pressan Ambo in The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), subtitled ‘Where is Francis?’ At least, those septuagenarian old boys who have been helping with enquiries have no information on ...”

“... of sexual impulses, and repressive in its recommendations about how they should be handled in young people, his Emile enjoys a thoroughly undeserved reputation as a liberal educational tract. Emancipated sexual belief gets a better showing when we downgrade a notch, to the realm of the popular and the practically reformist. The awkward case of William ...”

“... St Paul as the humiliated son of a failed businessman (and as the inordinately proud descendant of Francis Scott Key, author of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’); the glorious salad days at Princeton University, which he left without a degree; the wartime courtship of Zelda Sayre, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama; the sudden fame – and the marriage to Zelda ...”

“... province – or the time that he spent there. He shared his country schoolhouse childhood with his young sister Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every book. But though the dreaming reader persisted in Henri, he became tough and intransigent. He was sent to the ...”

“... I admire mountain, rock and ice-climbing from a respectful distance. When young and foolish, I tried it. I even went up what some experienced climbers call ‘the milk run’ to the peak of Matterhorn, but that climb was my last: all the way up I visualised Lord Francis Douglas coming down the way that he did in 1865 – straight – and it spoiled the trip for me ...”

“... up from an equally forgotten US radio series it’s a corny but percipient tale about a spunky young DJ who’s hep to the vital Swing rhythm the kids all dig, and the stuffy station owner who wants no part of her indecorous jive. Miller, as the wide awake DJ, specialises in the wake-up call requests of local servicemen, and the film was a big hit with US ...”

“... Tale? The closest thing to a horse in the play is that notorious bear. Acevedo sticks to Dick Francis, who inspires him to ‘become the first Mexican steeplechase jockey to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup’. Deirdre Donohue, a disillusioned Irish trainer, takes the complete works of Shakespeare with her on a cruise to Alaska, as she looks for ways to get ...”