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“... zone where the techniques of fiction and non-fiction intermingle outside the ambit of the novel. Francis Spufford is an almost parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar exploration (I May Be Some Time, 1996), a memoir of childhood reading (The Child that Books Built, 2002), a study of various unsung successes of postwar ...”

“... of Cicero and other classical masters. Those nervous or incapable of writing like this, could, as Richardson had discovered to his profit early in his publishing career, purchase volumes of model letters in English, replete with flourishes and sentiments often alien to the sender, but part nevertheless of the rhetorical currency required for any respectable ...”

“... new play, apparently Jane Austen’s version of a work she had admired from childhood, Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. It was actually a discovery only in a manner of speaking, since the manuscript was never properly lost. It had been handed down among the descendants of Jane Austen’s niece Anna Lefroy, born Anna Austen in 1793, the eldest ...”

“... had to be called.By the time Satie broke with Cocteau he was already working on a ballet with Francis Picabia called Relâche based on a script about Parisian nightlife by Blaise Cendrars, and in December 1924 it opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. It wasn’t unconfrontational. The set was studded with 370 mirrors and scrawled with graffiti ...”

“... or Klimt’s self-pleasuring odalisques. They’re charged with a furious erotic longing, and in Francis Bacon’s terms, they go straight past the brain to the nervous system. Self-revelation is an art, and public intimacy – to use Giuliana Bruno’s phrase – requires crafty selection, decisions and deceptions. ‘Hotel International’ (1993) The ...”

“... humanist. Barrell’s own discourse replaced the painters themselves by Shaftesbury, Addison, Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull and the Reynolds of the Discourses; partly because he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth ...”

“... of his dynamic father. On Capri he was to see himself as Byron, D.H. Lawrence as Shelley and Francis Brett Young as a more retiring kind of Keats. And Lawrence was fascinated by him, found him sympathetic and good company, and made him the model in his story called ‘The man who loved islands’. The story could just as well be about Lawrence ...”

“... Sequence, he co-founded with Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. Along with Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz aimed to bring a version of auteurism to British film, and they did as much with the documentary movement Free Cinema. In 1959, Reisz directed We Are the Lambeth Boys, and he made his first feature film a year later, Saturday Night and Sunday ...”

“... must have seemed so young as he asked his questions: ‘How did you get to Berlin?’ I asked Francis [Bacon]. He seemed to like being asked questions about his life. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘my father found me wearing my mother’s underclothes, and to put me right he sent me to a friend – like my father, a horse trainer. This was in Ireland. I left home ...”

“... and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous ...”

“... in the country and ‘were literary, even to the extent of having a resident poet of their own in Francis Thompson ... Their intensity – for they were very intense – was aesthetic, not, like the Eders’, progressive. The Meynells were Roman Catholics and very, very English.’ One of the pleasures Carswell’s book affords is glimpses into relatively ...”

“... even of overstating their own importance as artists. Novelists, beginning with Fielding on Richardson, have regularly represented other novelists as foolishly sanguine and unworldly, a charge which actually belittles fiction itself. Alison Lurie in Foreign Affairs uses a similar tactic, which is after all the readiest way for a naturalistic novelist to ...”

“... shared with the Leavises the founding of Scrutiny. ‘The high period of the journal,’ says Francis Mulhern in his book The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, ‘was that commanded by F.R. Leavis and the early graduates of Cambridge English, [D.W.] Harding, [L.C.] Knights, Q.D. Leavis and [Denys] Thompson – five authors who, in aggregate, wrote on virtually ...”

“... to have sadistic tendencies which she didn’t enjoy, while the theatre and film director Tony Richardson was so nervous of her that when lodging with the Smiths in St John’s Wood he hardly dared to take a bath. Manning’s generally direct and sophisticated treatment of sexual behaviour is one of the strengths of her fiction. In The Wind Changes, an ...”

“... to the Auld Alliance, Mary signed herself ‘Marie’ all her life. Had her first husband Francis II not died without producing an heir, ‘Scotland,’ Mackay concedes, ‘might have become a French appanage.’ Despite all this In My End Is My Beginning prefers to suggest that a misunderstood proto-liberalism was more responsible for the Queen’s ...”