“... a tough little bird out of Damon Runyon. She went at her Cobb salad like a demon. She had little gold earrings made like shirt buttons, and they glinted in tune with her eyes, which slid from side to side while these ‘European intellectuals’ talked about wine. The film director Karel Reisz was there, and his wife Betsy Blair, who had been in Hollywood at ...”

“... not cut much Parliamentary ice.’) There is an interesting memorandum here from 1955 by Sir Arthur Benson, the governor of Northern Rhodesia, which claims that most Africans would support Britain’s policy against the nationalists if Britain would only make their chiefs ‘divine’ again. Ian Smith took the same general line in 1965, just before the ...”

“... Stalin and ‘secret police’ carried out mock arrests and purges. It was in this atmosphere that Arthur Schlesinger Jr published his influential book The Vital Center. He denounced extremism on both right and left and pushed his vision of a ‘liberal anti-Communism’ and a ‘non-Communist left’, but – as Selverstone points out – the book took a ...”

“... to celebrate its rebuilding. Brave Enterprise was written by the theatre’s publicist, Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, who had moved to Stratford in 1925, after being appointed drama critic of the Stratford Herald on the recommendation of his famous second cousin, G.K. Chesterton. Born in 1899 in South Africa, where his father supervised a ...”

“... Not surprisingly, many servants of the Raj found her views tiresome in the extreme. In 1897, Arthur Godley, later Lord Kilbracken, who was under-secretary for India for 26 years, counselled his boss against republishing the 1858 proclamation to mark the Diamond Jubilee: ‘This is hardly the moment to remind the world that the queen promised to make no ...”

“... musical talent, which came from his grandfather, a resident organist at the Crystal Palace, via Arthur Coward’s less distinguished career demonstrating harmoniums for the piano makers Metzler & Co. Violet, whose family had greater pretensions to social status than her husband’s but with fewer means to maintain them, was also musical as well as witty and ...”

“... she does not always appear an attractive character. After Pemberton left her, she took up with Arthur Price, a small-time criminal and con man, helping him in his second-hand car business. She became ‘a part of that world’ and was amused by chatting in the pub to a couple of his friends ‘who specialised in robbing post offices and had it down to a ...”

“... put these spirits to work for unvirtuous ends: ‘To Make a Girl Dance in the Nude’, ‘To Have Gold Pieces, as Many and as Often and Every Time You Want’, and so on.What kinds of creature these spirits are and whether they can be considered good or evil is a controversial matter. In an essay included in his edition of the True Grimoire (2010), Jake ...”

“... vacuum in Central Asia prompted a series of bored, fame-hungry officers to play what one of them, Arthur Conolly, christened the Great Game. This involved trying to win influence with local rulers in the Central Asian khanates, in an attempt to replicate what their naval colleagues were doing on the coast. Without naval and commercial power to back them ...”

“... surgery retreads looking for vengeance, decent Hispanic cops, intelligent strippers with hearts of gold: a generically complacent agenda. But good fun to read from a few thousand miles away. You don’t have to worry, at that distance, about suspending disbelief. You’re happy to swallow an ex-state governor called Skink Tyree, a Vietnam vet liberal, who ...”

“... It was Florida, and in particular the resort of Long Key, to which he was first invited by Judge Arthur Powell in January 1922, that established for Stevens the geographical polarities that came to serve as his dominant metaphor for irreconcilable opposites. ‘We must come together as soon as we can and every winter afterwards,’ he wrote back to Elsie ...”

“... literary idea going back at least to Spenser) appears, according to Hughes, in such paintings as Arthur Hughes’s ambiguous April Love and The Long Engagement. The angelic-looking women in these two paintings might be monsters, she seems to suggest, because we can feel the throb of their deep blue and violet attire and see the sharp contrast between the ...”

“... his sense of life as erotic confusion and his consciousness of the horrors of modern warfare. Like Arthur Miller’s later Death of a Salesman, Death of a Hero has a protagonist who is an engaging and far from conventional hero. The first half of the novel draws on George Winterbourne’s conflicted feelings for two women – surely (though the author denied ...”

“... fragrances known to me, it gives the irresistible impression of a smooth, continuously curved, gold-coloured volume that stretches deliciously, like a sleepy panther, from top note to drydown. Yes, it contains rose, jasmine and aldehydes in the same way that a perfect body contains legs and arms. But I defy all who smell this to keep enough wits about them ...”

“... I like the little twist about Margherita’s favourite pair of gloves, ‘double kid bordered with gold thread’, and how she probably gave up wearing them after 1388, when a new Florentine law decreed that prostitutes had to wear gloves. Another favourite topic is health, about which Francesco fretted continuously. Prescriptions are offered by friends as ...”