“... 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 ...”

“... a scene from John Huston’s film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), which re-creates one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s legendary demonstrations of hypnosis before an audience of doctors at the Salpêtrière. With magical ease, Charcot makes two patients’ hysterical symptoms disappear. As Micale notes, the scene is taken from André Brouillet’s well-known ...”

“... of many small relics gnawed under the pretext of a reverent kiss – from the embalmed body of St Francis Xavier’. The Fascist asks Lewis how rich Ernesto is. He says there is no means of knowing. Travelling in the Balkans, Lewis met a successful author called Ladislas Farago, who was to make a million pounds, many years later, by pretending to meet ...”

“... Got News for You and The News Quiz respectively, Ian Hislop (Ardingly, Magdalen) and old Harrovian Francis Wheen tirelessly carry on the work that the Beyond the Fringe team started more than half a century ago.When Have I Got News for You moved to BBC One more than a decade ago it began to lose some of its teeth: so much so, after a while, that one regular ...”

“... possible. Circle, an ‘international survey of Constructive art’ edited by the architect Leslie Martin, the Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo and the abstractionist Ben Nicholson, was published in 1937. Although they roped in a few contributors, such as Herbert Read, who were willing to give the Surrealists (for example) the time of day, only ...”

“... in the puritan tradition. This study by Sheila Kirk and the equally thoughtful photographs by Martin Charles that go with it at last set out the full evidence on which this claim can rest. Webb was 18 and embarking on an obscure apprenticeship in Reading when The Seven Lamps of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he ...”

“... Breen, administer the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, Hays helped create what the historian Francis Couvares described as ‘an industry largely financed by Protestant bankers, operated by Jewish studio executives and policed by Catholic bureaucrats, all the while claiming to represent grass-roots America’. For Carr, this sense of the movies as an ...”

“... vulcanite mouthpieces frequently containing debris with a more or less bad odour.’ In June, Dr Francis Allan, a medical officer of the City of Westminster, reported the results of tests done on swabs taken from the mouthpieces of transmitters in public call boxes. One had attached to it a ‘mass of whitish-grey viscid substance’. The viscid substance ...”

“... of the Ferns Report, written by a tribunal chaired by the former Irish Supreme Court judge Francis Murphy. Ferns is a diocese made up of County Wexford in the south-east of Ireland and parts of some of the bordering counties. The tribunal was set up by the Irish government because there seemed to be more clerical offenders in this diocese than in any ...”

“... of the European continent. What should we call this alternative to Christian faith? Neither Francis Young nor Aleksander Pluskowski claim to be fully successful in their thoughtful treatments of the problem. Descriptions used in earlier times were negative, because Christians had come up with them. Eventually the most dangerous label coined for such ...”

“... mentions Vespucci, whose accounts of his travels had been published by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in a volume that included a map christening the newly found continents ‘America’. More added detail to lend his fantasy substance, including the Utopians’ alphabet, a woodcut of their croissant-shaped island resembling maps in ...”

“... Over the years, the story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was ...”

“... Hollywood, who realises that for someone that mean and tough there can be no permanent cure. Since Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1975) the Vietnam vet on the rampage has cropped up so frequently in American mythology he has become an icon of the country’s self-divisions and betrayals. Jones doesn’t present Baggit sentimentally or symbolically; if his ...”

“... Corbin situates the Giants’ Causeway in Wales, quotes a remark supposed to have been made by Francis Bacon years after he was dead, and claims that King Lear tried to throw himself off the cliff at Dover. Such are the problems that arise in work of broader scope; the smells, good and bad, of the earlier book are mostly French, but the désir du rivage ...”