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“... And with good reason: more than twenty-five years may have passed, but I distinctly remember how Frances Wood and I were warned that anyone contemplating working on the Mongol period in Chinese history would be issued with a bottle of aspirin, in view of the immense difficulties involved in studying an empire which employed in its administration not ...”

“... Marguerite Duras describes a crowd in French Indo-China (in 1930): ‘The clatter of wooden clogs is ear-splitting, the voices strident, Chinese is a language that’s shouted the way I always imagine desert languages are, it’s a language that’s incredibly foreign.’ This impression is familiar to me, from National Service days in Hong Kong and the British New Territories ...”

“... Day My Prince Will Come home with him from the dealer’s because the face on the cover is that of Frances Taylor, his ex-wife – ‘the best wife I ever had’, he says for himself and the movie says for him in its images. Frances is wonderfully played by Emayatzy Corinealdi. She talks about dancing as if it was a form of ...”

“... her. We were Macbeth until the camera shifted. We even get to see the lopped branches from Birnam Wood on their way to Dunsinane, which Macbeth learns of only by report. Some critics have felt the film is not grand enough, not up to the high rhetoric of its speeches, but the low-key acting adds a human element to scenes that are often played as ...”

“... plant shuts down, the people leave, even the zip code vanishes. A woman called Fern, played by Frances McDormand, takes up residence in a van. She spends a Christmas season working at an Amazon warehouse, and hopes for jobs elsewhere. She doesn’t want to go too far south, until one bitterly cold night she changes her mind, and takes off for ...”

“... On​ the face of it, Frances Wolfreston from Staffordshire looks like an unlikely literary star. She was born around 1607, had eleven children and lived in the manor house at Statfold near Tamworth, where her descendants still live today. But what she left when she died at the age of seventy was unusual: a library of several hundred books, dominated not by the standard theological works of the time but by an unmatched collection of what we would now call English literature ...”

“... employing havoc as a method of education. Conversely, the marquess’s grandmother, played by Frances de la Tour, looks old enough to be Methuselah’s sister, and embodies so perfectly the dream dowager, twinkly and intelligent, that she must be (and is) up to something else. Burn Gorman brings a special gothic nastiness to his part as the evil pursuer ...”

“... Andrew Maunder’s introduction to his new edition of Ellen Wood’s chronicle of scandalous goings-on among the Victorian middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations ...”

“... that in presenting an idealised world ‘with no parting, sadness or war . . . free of rotting wood, privation, disease and class conflict’, it gives us a ‘fairytale’ which, when contrasted with the ‘intense human sufferings’ described in Records of Woman, can only be seen as ironic. Hemans’s importance lies not in her contribution to the ...”

“... resident in the parish of St Giles without Cripplegate, and a woman from Whitechapel called Frances Williams. The charge was fornication. Though not in itself unusual, the charge had an extra twist, repeated with minor variations in most of the entries relating to it: ‘they were all 4 seene in bed together at one tyme.’ The documentation is ...”

“... website and the exhaustive catalogue, with lavish illustrations and meticulous curatorial notes by Frances Terpak. Terpak has left it to her culturalist colleagues to philosophise about epiphany, synaesthesia, cyberspace, the destabilised world order etc, while she describes the objects in the show. Her discussion of automata opens with a 17th-century ...”

“... who are superb are all those – Anne Archer, Madeleine Stowe, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Frances McNormand – who get a chance to underact, to play through despair and calamity as if they were just everyday weather. There is a moment in the film which is pure Altman, as good as anything he has ever done. The man who is learning horror make-up ...”

“... of drawing-room dimensions, made of polished metal below, canvas above, and bent, brown, jointed wood between. For us that sufficed. But the truly dedicated snob always has available to him an endless number of shifts and stratagems. In their innocence, the townsfolk of Kimberley could never have conceived the involuted cunning of a snobbery which would ...”

“... by matchlight in the basement of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, messing about on the Cam. Frances Spalding sees the problem. She is perceptive on Period Piece’s sometimes artful, sometimes awkwardly contrived faux-naivety, and on its self-serving censorship and selectivity. She points out, for example, that the death of Raverat’s nanny from cancer ...”

“... missed some of the Northern women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth, Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frances Browne and Anne Crone, whose varieties of Unionism and feminism would have been intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ‘Northern Protestant Oratory and Writing ...”