“... gestation of Les Danaïdes, and of the relationship between Gluck and Salieri, is that of Joseph Martin Kraus, a young composer who encountered Gluck in Vienna in the winter and spring of 1782-83. According to Kraus, who does not seem to have had any reasons for partiality, Salieri worked on the opera as an amanuensis until Gluck abandoned it. He then took ...”

“... and Picasso; he’s never shown and he has the most extraordinary life.’ He was referring to Francis Bacon. That year, Bacon exhibited Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. After the two met, ‘the friendship,’ Feaver writes, ‘was to spur Freud for the next thirty years … Bacon was, he said, the “wildest and wisest” person he ...”

“... like other areas with old religious or monastic connections (the Whitefriars, the Minories, St Martin le Grand, St Katherine by the Tower), was one of London’s quasi-autonomous ‘liberties’, and so not governed by the lord mayor. The second was that there had already been a theatre in the area, immediately adjacent to the building on which Burbage’s ...”

“... and more affecting, chief among them the subject’s hands. One hand alone may clutch the brow (Martin Luther King, 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip (Colette, 1952) or into the lower lip (Tony Hancock, 1962), or feel the forelock (Francis Bacon, 1981); two ...”

“... Towne came across Ask the Dust and took up Fante’s cause. He optioned the novel and persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to do the same for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John ...”

“... Miller offers a ‘likeness’. The word is well chosen. In Hogg’s Confessions, the devilish Gil-Martin assumes the likeness of other men and penetrates their thoughts just by pondering their faces. This is close to Hogg’s practice as a writer. Impersonation, mimicry, ventriloquism: these are central to his work. Hogg forged old ballads. He parodied ...”

“... as to his age and appearance was contradictory. More than 130 suspects are listed in Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner’s authoritative The Jack the Ripper A to Z (1991). Curtis claims that Ripperologists have ‘brought us no closer to the real culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888’, but he is unduly dismissive of Stewart Evans ...”

“... to find a way to live. In the book, Kerouac had divided himself among several brothers named Martin. One (Pete) was fiercely determined to excel at football, a second (Joe) drove big trucks and longed to wander the West at terrifying speed on a motorcycle, and a third (Francis) was ‘a musing, discontented, lonely ...”

“... mathematics’ considered quantity in the abstract (arithmetic, geometry and algebra), what Francis Bacon called ‘mixed mathematics’ dealt with the manifestations of quantitative relations in actual physical entities, so including many investigations and practices central to the trades and the arts of war: astronomy, optics and music; but also ...”

“... slide projector, or by collaging them, or simply by using them as source material, as with work by Francis Bacon or Richard Hamilton. Photography has long been used by artists as a substitute for drawing or as an iconic intermediary between reality and representation.Richter makes use of photographs in a way which is both extremely personal, even ...”

“... had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of Hollywood ‘plagiarising’ European innovations and rendering them ‘banal’. For Kael, they rejuvenated what ...”

“... melody for high strings played over a repeating woodwind figure, and sounds to me exactly like Francis Poulenc. Anyway, English-sounding or not, Hitchcock loved the music for The Trouble with Harry and immediately engaged Herrmann to score his remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. The project didn’t inspire his best efforts, however, and the film’s most ...”

“... I streak around later. I have a brief moment of panic. Is it wrong to meet the pope? Then: if Martin Scorsese did it, it’s probably fine.The photographer Andres Serrano is tall and his look is pastoral. His colour is mild and his eyes look like two skips of a stone across the water. This is not true in pictures but it is true in person. He walks through ...”

“... burning in the name of the Holy Ghost. Joyously, the Franciscan Monastery blazed in the name of St Francis, who had loved fire and sung hymns to it. Our Lady Street burned for Father and Son at once. Needless to say the Lumber Market, Coal Market and Haymarket burned to the ground. In Baker Street the ovens burned, and the bread and rolls with them. In Milk ...”

“... nation’s first ever ‘stand your ground’ gun law (the legislation that gave us the Trayvon Martin killing and countless other instances of unpunished citizen bloodletting); and prolonging the life of the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo in a cynical bid to burnish his culture wars résumé. Also disgraceful was the disenfranchisement of Florida’s ...”