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“... Days of German St Francis didn’t speak German to the robins he fed, nor did Scott as he trudged through the snow, but I did as I crossed the border to Alsace-Lorraine all that winter of ‘77, to dine on choucroute, stock up on wine – bootfuls of it – and bring back ripe munster to stink out the shared fridge on that final 13th floor of the Studenten Wohnheim, from whose balcony we saw far into France, right to the Vosges, and closer, just beneath us, the affair being conducted in the allotments (we rented the binoculars to students from other floors), and where, in July ‘78, after the goodbye party high in the Black Forest, on the eve of a trip to Italy, I announced I wasn’t going because I’d dreamed twice we’d driven off a cliff, straight into the Adriatic, and my friend, to my surprise, hugged me, saying she’d had the same dream – and where the first room I was offered had been a recent suicide’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... selections from his verse, both excellent – Michael Hofmann’s for the NYRB Poets series and Matthew Francis’s New Selected Poems for Faber – the early work doesn’t get much of a showing, even though Graham retained a soft spot for it and made sure these poems were represented in the original Collected Poems that appeared towards the end of ...”

“... account of the conception and birth of Jesus, and even those schoolboys probably care little that Matthew and Luke, the two which do provide Nativity narratives, fail to agree about many important details. Moreover, there are received ideas about the Nativity narrative that have no warrant in either version. So, it may be asked, who cares? Yet to look into ...”

“... is about a poker-player and pool hustler called Billy Phelan, who meets his long-lost father, Francis, toward the end of the book. The old man looks like ‘Pete the Tramp without a hat, without the spiky moustache, without the comedy’. Billy asks Francis: ‘What happened to your finger?’ The father ...”

“... particular scrutiny. Here is her news machine effectively downing her then Leader of the House, Mr Francis Pym, for what she saw as his economic pessimism. ‘Senior Whitehall sources said that Mrs Thatcher was furious,’ reported the Daily Mail. Even a Budget leak, it seems, is not beyond her. In January 1981, four newspapers whose Lobby men were invited for ...”

“... gifts of the Alexandrian legacy: Scholars of antiquity are amused when modernists credit Francis Bacon with inventing the phrase ‘knowledge is power.’ Bacon may have popularised the tocsin of the scientific revolution, but in Alexandria, eighteen hundred years earlier, the quest for universal knowledge had already inspired kingly enterprise. The ...”

“... in restoring sight to the blind (Luke 4.19), casting out demons (Luke 9.1), cleansing lepers (Matthew 8.1-4), feeding thousands (Luke 9.10-17) and raising the dead (John 11.1-43), but I never quite managed any of those, and had to make do with speaking in tongues (Acts 2.4), having visions (Acts 2.17) and receiving words of wisdom (1 Corinthians ...”

“... devaluation of all three (and much besides) since the Enlightenment: civilisation ruined thanks to Francis Bacon, Rousseau, Hume, Comte, Marx, Bergson, William James, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Gramsci, Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins, liberation theologians, Princess Diana, Professor Nutt, someone called ...”

“... in letters, puts alongside one another the reports of the splenetic but good-hearted hypochondriac Matthew Bramble, seeing wherever he looks in Georgian London the flotsam of ‘a tide of luxury’, and of his niece Lydia Melford, a frothy but virtuous ingénue who discovers, instead, ‘wealth and grandeur’ comparable only to ‘the Arabian Night’s ...”

“... it lay behind the remark by an Inuit that only one explorer in his memory – the black American, Matthew Henson – ‘could speak our language without using his tongue like a baby’. Tom Lowenstein calls the Tikigaqmiut ‘nationalistic’. Despite the absence in Tikigaq of every structure and institution that compose a nation in the European sense, it ...”

“... His brand of humour owes more than a little to French farces such as Pathelin, which delighted Francis I when acted at Court. As a student at Montpellier, Rabelais played in a farce and remained proud of the fact. ‘Medieval’ farces were the relaxation of Renaissance kings and the sport of the Renaissance intelligentsia, who (as students) used them for ...”

“... The period​ in Francis Bacon’s life between 1933 and 1944 remains a mystery. We know who he was seeing and where he was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion ...”

“... his style unannounced. Hazlitt himself was not above such things – Wu shows him recycling from Francis Jeffrey’s prose, for example – and sometimes the verbal evidence strains under the weight that Wu places on it. There is also a pick-and-mix approach to the value of biographical clues in the articles themselves. When attributing a piece on ‘The ...”

“... as the Lord spake unto David my father.This passage is very close indeed to the translation in the Matthew Bible of 1537 (by William Tyndale) and there are just two differences from the King James Bible of 1611 (‘evil occurrent’ in place of ‘any evil plague’; ‘purpose’ for ‘am determined’). But this version is from the Great Bible of ...”