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“... and flyers – whose feats did arouse overwhelming public sympathy and veneration. The findings of Martin Francis’s The Flyer, an illuminating if at times rather earthbound account of wartime and postwar Britain’s romance with the RAF, make more sense when seen in light of this wartime moral economy of sacrifice and suffering. Fighter pilots were ...”

“... tank … sure, what do you even say?’ A Twitter account, @BabiesTuam, still tweets their names: Martin Francis Bane, 3 months; Mary Margaret Jordan, 18 months; John Joseph Mills, 5 months. Feeney herself is creative director of the Tuam Oral History Project, an archive of survivor testimonies.This history echoes throughout As You Were. We hear of one ...”

“... were evidently independent, well-off and confident in legal matters, like the ‘blackamore’ Martin Francis, who in October 1658 sued three Shadwell women after they defrauded him of £7 – a sizeable sum. But many more ‘belonged’ to others, through ties of servitude or bondage. Even fairly modest households relied on menial servants, and ...”

“... Francis Bacon has had a variety of reputations, which have tended to go up and down in a random or independent sort of way. At the moment he is generally regarded as a master of English rhetoric, an unsuccessful reformer of natural philosophy, and a cold fish. Julian Martin has tried to put him together, not by a lumping biography, but by finding the crux ...”

“... a thousand sermons, and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas,’ he wrote in his early twenties. He showed an early talent for art, and was sent to the Slade through the benevolence of a local Lady Bountiful. He emerged from it in 1912, an almost dwarfish figure a couple of inches over five ...”

“... over a hundred pounds a year. He was rescued by the rich and childless bursar of his college, Francis Martin, who had heard of his troubles, and offered to support him until he could earn his own living. Martin lavished affection on the handsome, hard-pressed young scholar, but, the authors say, ‘the younger man ...”

“... Francis Bacon liked to rail against illustration. ‘If you know how to record it you illustrate it,’ he’d cry. As for ‘illustrational paint’, ughh – the thought of that would set the jowls shuddering. ‘Illustration’ wasn’t just to be despised on its own account, it was a word to be smeared across whatever he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries ...”

“... regular appearances at South Coast magistrates’ courts after Bank Holiday weekends. Trevor Francis, usually the identikit poet, dreamer and heart-throb of the lower sixth, looked like a mean and frazzled brawler when he missed that easy header in the second half. As for Terry McDermott, who cuts a pretty unreliable figure at the best of times ... By ...”

“... Norwich and ‘travels a good deal.’ In form, Doctor Criminale is an old-fashioned quest novel. Francis Jay, a young British journalist – trained in deconstruction and cultural politics at Sussex – is left high and dry when his paper (evidently the ill-fated Sunday Correspondent) folds. Following a disastrous Booker ceremony at which he comports himself ...”

“... that it was painted in Spanish Town, the colony’s capital; and that it showed a man called Francis Williams, about whom Long had written a whole chapter in his celebrated History of Jamaica (1774). Not only that, he says, but when Long was writing that chapter, he had this painting in front of him and was describing it. The dealer, Jack Spink, is ...”

“... I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman. He arranged a meeting with the editor, Kingsley Martin, then at the peak of his glory, who said ‘Why not?’, explained that he conceived his typical reader as a male civil servant in his forties, and passed me on to the commander of the (cultural) back half of the mag, the formidable Janet Adam Smith. Her ...”

“... are portraits of Stein by Picasso, Man Ray, Jo Davidson, Alvin Langdon Coburn. Félix Vallotton, Francis Picabia, Jacques Lipschitz, Carl Van Vechten, Cecil Beaton. Francis Rose and Elie Nadelman. With Coburn, she is monumental, with Man Ray domestic, with Beaton wistful and, later, desolate. Stendhal’s intelligent ...”

“... hysteria, but can only manage a rather smutty slapstick. Detectable here is the influence of Martin Amis, whose gleeful nastiness in the bedroom has become quite a touchstone for many youngish male novelists. The book is elsewhere littered with sentences that are straight Amisian repro: ‘Then there was money: it seemed money had taken a look at ...”

“... to embrace the sober-minded, philistine meliorism of a Macaulay, whose famous jibe in his essay on Francis Bacon that ‘an acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia’ is the credo, in Jacoby’s view, of our cynically apathetic, myopically pragmatic age. Although he readily concedes that he has no blueprint for action himself, he nonetheless ...”

“... second period in Milan, a few years in Rome at the invitation of the pope and finally a summons by Francis I to France, where he died in 1519, aged 67. His reputation, already very high in his lifetime, continued to grow after his death, and he regularly appeared in lists of outstanding modern painters. The earliest published account of his life, in the first ...”