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“... 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 ...”

“... the Council in the Marches of Wales, an offshoot of the Privy Council, ordered its jailkeeper, Francis Hunnyngs, to confine Walter Witherley ‘in little ease’ for his disobedience to its commands. Witherley applied to the court of King’s Bench in London for a writ of habeas corpus so that they might investigate the ...”

“... is one option open to writers of club fiction: China Miéville concludes his acknowledgments in King Rat with ‘awe and gratitude especially to A Guy Called Gerald for the sublime Gloc: old, now, but still the most terrifying slab of guerrilla bass ever committed to vinyl. Rewind.’ In the central club episode of Deadmeat, Q writes of a DJ’s music that ...”

“... of resistance, which had hitherto threatened rulers, now threatened the ruling class. In 1808 Francis Jeffrey, writing in the Whig Edinburgh Review, lamented that it had become ‘unfashionable, and not very popular, to talk of the tyranny of the Stuarts, and the triumph of the Revolution, in the tone that was universal and established within these last ...”

“... my boss used to say – at Faber and Faber. I didn’t know him well – a friend of mine, Francis Hope, was his assistant – but I talked to him at parties and once or twice I had lunch with him (I remember being told to eat my meat). He was a charismatic figure, tall, fair, slim, nattily dressed, flirtatious and a little wayward – a ...”

“... than two pages devoted to its royal house, which is rather modest considering that His Majesty King Michael I of Romania serves as Chairman of the Comité de Patronage of the Société des Amis de I’Almanach de Gotha 1998. From these pages I learn that Michael or Mihai was born to King Carol in 1921 and ...”

“... Tale? The closest thing to a horse in the play is that notorious bear. Acevedo sticks to Dick Francis, who inspires him to ‘become the first Mexican steeplechase jockey to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup’. Deirdre Donohue, a disillusioned Irish trainer, takes the complete works of Shakespeare with her on a cruise to Alaska, as she looks for ways to get ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... vulnerable.The flu wasn’t Spanish at all. The name stuck when in May 1918 the Spanish king, the prime minister and his entire cabinet all came down with it. In Madrid, it was known as the Naples Soldier after a catchy tune then in circulation, while French military doctors called it Disease 11. In Senegal it was Brazilian flu; in Brazil it was ...”

“... and a serious but erratic scholar (at one point he planned to invade Albania and crown himself king), the first person to begin excavating and classifying the fossils of the Hateg basin in Romania. He was also the first to propose (correctly) that Cretaceous Europe had been an island archipelago, arguing that the small size of the continent’s dinosaurs ...”

“... the Paddington frisk’. ‘The whole vagabond population of London,’ the diarist Francis Place wrote, ‘all the thieves, and all the prostitutes, all those who were evil-minded, and some, a comparatively few, curious people made up the mob on those brutalising occasions.’ The memorial to the execution site at Marble Arch is embedded in the ...”

“... style of the Amarnan artists represents a group of ancient impressionists who had taken over the King’s academies to send new life running through the vapid excellences of orthodox state art. Others, however, seeing mere glandular disorders at the bottom of such extravagant visions (one wonders what such critics would make of ...”

“... for the souls of the penitent on earth as well as for the wept-for departed.’ Thomas Becket and Francis of Assisi were both noted for their tears. St Francis was reputed to have gone blind with his weeping for the sufferings of Christ. On his deathbed, he remembered to thank his donkey for carrying him through his arduous ...”

“... who survived the Flood by riding astride the Ark, is derived from a rabbinical story of Og, King of Bashan. He also suggests that Rabelais was sympathetic to the ‘Ancient Theology’, the idea of a special revelation to non-Christian sages like Orpheus, Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus. The medical and legal allusions are in even greater need of ...”

“... of civilisation, as Spengler had famously put it, over culture – has anything to say to us. Francis Dunlop and, one assumes, his publishers, Roger Scruton and Jessica Douglas-Home, have no doubts. Scheler, Dunlop suggests, was addressing ‘a political situation not unlike our own ... a breakdown of the old order, loss of the sense of community, triumph ...”