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“... journey, these novels aver. The two brightest spirits of the Gordon second generation, Francis and Dorothy, break loose, but only to wither in absolute loneliness. Having got to the top of the slippery pole of English publishing, Francis is last seen alone in his hospital room suddenly aware that his career has ...”

“... That perverse distinction has of course been conferred on Coke’s would-be nemesis, Francis Bacon, of whom the historian A.L. Morton wrote in The English Utopia:There is perhaps no great English writer whose personality is less attractive than Bacon’s, and all the elaborate apologias of his many admirers and the power and magnificence of his ...”

“... cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of ...”

“... it personally, as though an old and close friend is being traduced, which indeed is close to the mark. Sutherland has one good answer to those who hate his book: his subtitle, which is in fact the series-title of a list of new literary biographies under Claude Rawson’s general editorship. If you want an uncritical biography, Sutherland might say, don’t ...”

“... ceiling – in particular, Jeremiah. Such inapposite quotations should be considered neither the mark of Mulready’s ambition nor the measure of his failure. As genre, this is a kind illustration of the importunate self-advertisement found in young poets. As something more than genre, it reminds us of the long-lived idea that a studious application to high ...”

“... plant life, stands as a ragged prospectus for the remaining ten years of Van Gogh’s career. His mark-making would reliably quicken wherever vegetation grew, but the stems and spurts always responded to the weight of life as people experienced it. There was a modern human condition, burdensome and coal-dependent. Infusions of nature (and later, by ...”

“... Angel Exhaust. The history of Irish avant-garde journals is even more elusive. There was Francis Stuart and Cecil Salkeld’s To-morrow, which lived up to its title, just about, by struggling to a second issue before expiring. Con Leventhal’s Klaxon arrived in 1924 with Blast-like promises of ‘a whiff of Dadaist Europe to kick Ireland into ...”

“... lay professors to replace teachers he considered too progressive,’ Paul Vallely writes in Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (2013). ‘He tried to make us more like a religious order,’ one of Bergoglio’s students recalled, ‘wearing surplices and singing the office … Bergoglio brought in an arch-conservative, the military chaplain from Moreno Air ...”

“... or non-verbal intelligence tests, and less well on verbal abilities and achievements’, and Francis Hsu’s Rorschach test results showing that ‘the stimulus as a whole has more salience for the Chinese; the parts for the Americans.’ Chinese upbringing leads to the ‘inhibition of exploratory playfulness’, and ‘Chinese are less creative than ...”

“... I was not able to get to the major exhibition organised by the city of Bruges to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Hans Memling. But there is consolation in the fact that if one has ever been to Bruges one knows something of what his art is like. To a remarkable degree Memling has come to be identified with this city, whose centre is a preserve out of time ...”

“... and Counter-Reformation, broken down into such themes as ‘Christian obedience and authority’ (Francis Oakley), ‘Calvinism and resistance theory’ (Robert Kingdon), ‘Catholic resistance theory, ultramontanism and the royalist response’ (J.H.M. Salmon) and ‘sovereignty and the mixed constitution: Bodin and his critics’ (Julian Franklin). It is ...”

“... Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from quite different directions and differ greatly in their concepts of literary biography. The biographical study of Jane Austen began in a succession of family memoirs, culminating in the ...”

“... old life up to speed. He would go anywhere and do anything for the chance to suck somebody off. Mark you, even this desire had been coloured, if that’s the word I want, by advancing years. He tended to say that he did it on doctor’s orders (‘the potassium ingredient is frightfully good for one’). He did not, even when faced with decrepitude, much ...”

“... della Casa took for granted that laughter was mainly an expression of scorn – ‘it being a mark of greater contempt to laugh at a person, than to do him any real injury’. As the Elizabethan humanist Thomas Wilson wrote, ‘the occasion of laughter and the mean that maketh us merry … is the fondness, the filthiness, the deformity, and all such evil ...”

“... from physicists and astronomers. Best known among them are the Nobel laureates James Watson and Francis Crick; less well known is Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1958 aged 37. Today many believe that, had she lived, she, too, would have won a Nobel Prize for her pivotal contribution to the work on DNA and subsequently on the structure of the tobacco mosaic ...”