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“... say, meaning ‘he’s barmy,’ but it certainly kept him happy.7 February. Ploughing on with the Francis Bacon biography, a depressing book with the regular critiques of Bacon’s work, particularly by David Sylvester, often hard to understand. So much drink in the book that I wonder, had I liked drink more, would it have altered my life and made it more ...”

“... as well as horrific. The Violent Bear It Away is just horrific. Like Hazel Motes, the 14-year-old Francis Marion Tarwater rebels vehemently, but in vain, against his prophethood. The cleansing process again involves extreme acts of violence; Tarwater baptises, then drowns, his young idiot cousin in a lake, and is himself raped by a lavender-shirted pederast ...”

“... trader and a plantation owner called Captain Ralph Quarles (a descendant of the Jacobean poet Francis Quarles), while one of his maternal great-grandmothers was Cherokee. When Hughes first set foot in Africa in 1923, having jettisoned his studies at Columbia and shipped out as a mess boy, none of the people he encountered in Dakar or Lagos or the other ...”

“... photographs showed what had never been noticed, or, if noticed, had been turned away from. Francis Bacon, who based pictures on Muybridge’s studies of men wrestling, also used illustrations from a book about diseases of the mouth, but his pictures are still painterly, and the quality of the marks is personal. Pop art borrowed another set of non-art ...”

“... the film was shot in Hungary, the cast and crew apparently spent a lot of time talking about Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), not the same story but not unrelated, and certainly timely in its fictional origin of 1897. Baxter sees that Bella’s relative innocence (as well as her enjoyment of sex) makes her vulnerable, and asks ...”

“... curious sparkle to the biography’s naming of names. Macrone published a memoir by an adventurer, Francis Maceroni, who’d served as an aide-de-camp to the Napoleonic general Murat; Thackeray served as an aide-de-camp to the memoir, making it more publishable, less digressive. ‘Macaroni’ was then an English word for a dandy prone to foreign ...”

“... however, there was room for the celebration of military heroism. Wounds were for some a permanent mark of honour. Those suffered by Sir William Godolphin, injured at Boulogne, were ‘no less to the beautifying of his fame, than the disfiguring of his face’. Successful captains gave their names to bulwarks and defences; victories and honours were celebrated ...”

“... entertaining inventors, pretenders, dreamers and other rascals. Take the two enterprising brothers Francis and George Moult. In the early 1690s, Nehemiah Grew invented a means of deriving salt from the ‘spa waters bubbling up in the outskirts of London’, long known to have healing properties, and set up a factory for the production of what came to be known ...”

“... In the spring of 2008, shortly after he started reading Infinite Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I’d said it was, one of the greatest literary works of all time; b) but when he got to the ending – 981 pp. body copy, another 96 of small-print endnotes – did I think he was going to think it was worth it? No, I said, the ending’s infuriating, and although the author denied it and I haven’t made a study of the available papers, I still suspect it was to some extent an afterthought, a way of ducking out of a project that, without it, would maybe never have ended at all ...”

“... for example, once belonged to the gossipy antiquarian Anthony Wood (1632-95); ‘Douce’ means Francis Douce (1757-1834), keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, known for a bitter resignation letter of 1811 listing his thirteen reasons for leaving (number nine: ‘The want of society with the members, their habits wholly different & their manners far ...”

“... neither exhibition has addressed the artist as economic agent, their money or their debts. When Mark Carney announced that Turner would be on the next £20 note, he didn’t mention that Turner was a stock holder in the the Bank of England. Thomas Rowlandson was once a rake; in The Chamber of Genius he depicts a dishevelled artist at work at his easel in a ...”

“... them to lie on his sofa while he spanked their bare buttocks. In his Introduction, the author Mark Peel pays tribute to Trench’s ‘common touch’ without referring to his most common touch of all: the sensuous fingering of his pupils’ buttocks before and during the interminable beatings. He goes on to describe Trench’s ‘contribution to the life ...”

“... weren’t straightforwardly upper-class. On the one hand, Boofy Arran; on the other, Lord Goodman. Mark Amory inadvertently sets the scene when he says in his foreword that he’d had to tidy up her spelling because ‘she never spotted the first “a” in Isaiah.’ ‘People born in all sorts of strata of society enjoyed the fruits of success,’ Cecil ...”

“... Its catastrophically small share of the world aviation market gave it scarcity value. The mark of its failure could become the badge of its exclusivity. Concorde’s glamour, he saw, could be used to differentiate BA in the crowded market for transatlantic flights. It could be made into a unique selling point for the whole airline – BA-commissioned ...”

“... and Charles Robb (who opposed it). A proposed exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum to mark the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb produced howls of outrage from veterans’ organisations, who charged that initial plans cast the Japanese of the Second World War as innocent victims rather than aggressors. The pressure exerted ...”