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“... Why does every home not have a whole wall of encyclopedias, now that we supposedly live in the Information Age? Why have they failed to establish themselves as indispensable items of furniture, against the competition of electronic gadgetry? Because they are contenting themselves with just giving information, instead of sharpening it, so that it points somewhere ...”

“... coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in ...”

“... about ‘international cinema’ (or, at any rate, the movies of Robert Taylor, the Three Stooges, Francis the Talking Mule and Maria Montez). It was at the old Academy in Oxford Street, at the National Film Theatre, and at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, that, with mixed feelings of high elation and shame at my own previous ignorance, I filled in this ...”

“... at Twickenham and Murrayfield has put players of school and amateur rugby in greater danger. Peter Robinson’s 14-year-old son Benjamin died in 2011, his life-support machine switched off two days after he sustained three head injuries in a single game – a game during which his mother was told by the referee to ‘calm down’ when she questioned whether he ...”

“... The publication in February of the Francis Report into the failings of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was the worst of the many recent bad news stories about the NHS, its significance underscored by the fact that David Cameron felt it necessary to present the report to the House of the Commons himself, rather than leave it to the secretary of state for health ...”

“... to chart the history of secret policing. Their prize source is the former undercover officer Peter Francis, who spied on minor anti-fascist and anti-racist groups in North London in the early 1990s before infiltrating his target group, Anti-Fascist Action. While undercover, he lived alone in Highbury, drove a van and got a day job working in a school for ...”

“... that any incriminating letters survive: Dickens’s son Henry and Ellen Ternan’s son Geoffrey Robinson destroyed all such correspondence. Dickens himself burned any personal letters that he could come by. He also destroyed his diaries at the end of every year. One diary – that for 1867 – was lost or, more likely, stolen in America. It resurfaced in ...”

“... From the moment he died in April 1590, Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Elizabeth I, has been the subject of competing myths. Catholics greeted the demise of a relentless opponent with relief and applause, and circulated lurid providential stories about the appalling stench that came from his corpse, which allegedly poisoned one of his pall-bearers ...”

“... is richly connotative, while scientific language is merely denotative. (It isn’t clear where Francis Bacon would fit on this axis.) Science deals with facts, and art with values. The Victorian man of letters spent much of his time seeking to coat unpalatable scientific truths with the sugar of spiritual consolation. Science’s chilling reports on the ...”

“... read books all day; he likes nothing better than to discuss them with like-minded individuals – Francis Elless the schoolmaster, or Thomas Davy the shoemaker, with whom Turner shares one of the two informative ‘improving’ journals he regularly takes. The self-portrait Turner sketches in his diary is of a young man who naturally has little time for the ...”

“... later in the century the sect was ruled ‘by force of intellect’ rather than wealth by Thomas Robinson, a mostly unemployed shoemaker and recipient of the sect’s charity. Most members belonged to the lower levels of artisanship and trade, neither poor nor rich. They included, as one would expect, many women, whose role in transmitting the faith must not ...”

“... In March 1992 I received a printed invitation from Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he had given in Berlin on St Patrick’s Day 1941. I wondered, when I read it, why Francis had sent this. Over the years he had invited me to several events, but he had never had invitations printed ...”

“... womanly, suffused with the traditional female vices of profligacy and sensuality. If Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was Economic Man in the heroic mode, he was shadowed by Economic Woman: Moll Flanders, the emblem of an age of passions run rampant. Not everyone shared this pessimism. A very different mood could also be found in Enlightenment Britain, as ...”

“... homosexual men to confide in and gossip with, and these came in the guise of the playwright Lennox Robinson and the poet Thomas MacGreevy. Since most of Dublin suspected their homosexuality, ‘neither was a threat to the good name of Mrs W.B. Yeats,’ Saddlemyer writes. She worked with both on the Dublin Drama League, which sought to produce more ...”

“... guise, and so helps to reinforce it. They are end-of-history texts, fictional equivalents of Francis Fukuyama, which deny that reality could be transformed in the very act of proclaiming how it could be improved. The Island of Liberty (1848) shows an enlightened aristocrat carrying out an experiment in human equality on a South Sea island, a project ...”