“... asked Joan Collins if she could ‘borrow’ some of her jewellery (Collins refused). She asked a young Tom Cruise for a diamond tennis bracelet (made up of many identical settings), but Cruise didn’t know what she meant and sent some cash instead. Farrell, however, was in sympathy with what he called Taylor’s ‘appetites’ and bought her a diamond ...”

“... of India does anyone now remember? The heroes of Empire were never the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls ...”

“... romantic of British heroes: ‘this quiet sedentary student has a mind similar to the body of Sir Francis Drake, ranging distant countries and bringing back their treasures for his own kind.’ It would be convenient to dismiss this nonsense as the outpourings of a pre-war hack, with an unabashed talent for hyperbole and a peculiar passion for The Golden ...”

“... sent him to Seville to apprentice with the little-known painter Pedro Díaz de Villanueva. The young Zurbarán then set up his own workshop in Llerena (about 30 km from his hometown). Everything we know about this period derives from documented commissions rather than surviving works. One such commission came in 1624 from the Mercedarians in Azuaga, near ...”

“... This disapproval fills her with shame and undermines her confidence. Lucian was attracted to young women artists precisely because they were neurotic. He was drawn to their vulnerability. There is a sad pattern to this biography: the long list of sensitive young women, one after another, who fall for Lucian and, when ...”

“... name for a novelist since Will Self, has been acclaimed by the Guardian as ‘one of the foremost young lions of British hip-lit’. An unsportingly anonymous Londoner, by contrast, sticking their neck out on amazon.co.uk, described Corpsing as ‘a waste of a perfectly good tree’, adding: ‘Penguin should be thoroughly ashamed of itself . . . If this is ...”

“... figures who remain on the fringes of this biography. So, also, do Newman’s family. His brother Francis, whose career on the extreme left wing, as it were, of Protestantism mirrors Newman’s on the extreme right, makes only fleeting appearances, and his sisters and brother Charles appear even less. As for Newman’s parents, it would be interesting to know ...”

“... ago’; ‘The evening when we first met’; ‘It isn’t as it was 18 years ago’; ‘I met Francis Jansen when I was 19.’ These phrases are taken almost at random from the opening pages of five different, recent novels, and they are entirely characteristic. Modiano’s narrator registers lapses of time, situates himself at meticulously specified ...”

“... family, and fell into a depression; in his loneliness, he persuaded Harriet Westbrook, a pleasant young woman, to elope with him, and then established an unsatisfactory triangulated household with her older sister, Eliza; they wandered about, visiting, among other places, Ireland, where Shelley tried to foment revolution; he fled Harriet and Eliza, partly on ...”

“... chancel. In the 15th century, the church was home to a choir, which meant herding together a dozen young boys and making them stand still for long periods of time; in the 1550s, the building came to be used as a grammar school, which meant gathering a larger number of boys and making them sit still for even longer periods of time. When archaeologists excavated ...”

“... category that includes a few husbands), proceeding to penitents, martyred matrons (seven young boys among them) and martyred virgins. Like the architecture to which it is wedded, it unfolds, stanza by stanza.Little in the way of physical action is represented, though a notable exception is the penitent actress Pelagia, who raises her arms to remove ...”

“... of The Cardinal’s Hat is a man very much on the make: an ambassador to the court of France under Francis I, a passionate sportsman (real tennis and hunting) and, above all, desperate to be made a cardinal. He is in his mid-twenties, possessed of a splendid income, a strong body and a large network of connections. He is not yet, as Mary Hollingsworth ...”

“... lie on the page unexplained. The record for unsourced quotations is held by the mysterious Brendan Francis, whose name is undiscoverable in the British Library catalogue or the usual reference books. He has 56 entries on subjects ranging from homosexuality to horror movies; he even writes on quotations: ‘A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a ...”

“... into by undercover officers. Many more would follow.In 2013, one former SDS officer, Peter Francis, spoke publicly about the unit’s role in spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by a gang of white youths in 1993, a fact that had not been disclosed to the Macpherson Inquiry into the police failure to properly ...”

“... governor. In 1513 he moved to Rome to work for the pope; in 1516 he accepted an invitation from Francis I and travelled to Amboise, where he died three years later.Several short accounts of Leonardo’s life were published over the next couple of decades, of which the most interesting was by the historian and physician Paolo Giovio, who had probably met ...”