“... Australia’s first Government House, built for Captain Arthur Phillip when he arrived with the first fleet of convicts and settlers in 1788, was demolished in 1846 to make way for the grander Neoclassical architecture that befitted a burgeoning colony. Today the site is the forecourt of the new Museum of Sydney, with the ghostly floor-plan of the original residence picked out in white on the granite flagstones ...”

“... two people, Maggie. That’s what it’s for.’ Thus Quentin, the tormented Prospero-figure in Arthur Miller’s autobiographical play After the Fall. Maggie replies by eating a handful of pills, and the scene then twists and turns between Quentin’s acknowledged guilt and his defiant belief that she would have done it anyway. Miller survived the long ...”

“... since the victories of Edward I to pursue claims made as the original ‘Britons’. Glyn Dŵr had little trouble in linking himself with the long line of Welsh messiahs, including Arthur, who offered to expel the English and regain control of the whole island of Britain. The revolt effectively lasted from Glyn Dŵr’s ...”

“... not only of ancient paganism – about which, in the British Isles, we know remarkably little, mostly from archaeology rather than written sources – but also of the modern kind, about which we know a great deal, from documentary evidence and living informants. His new book may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought ...”

“... that ‘people want something larger and longer.’ His response was the book-length Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the purported manuscript of a shipwreck survivor carried on ocean currents to the South Pole, where he fetches up on an unknown island with a temperate climate and an ancient civilisation. Poe was inspired by the real-life ...”

“... Speaking​ of his remarkable version of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, John Ashbery said: ‘I myself try to be very literal, and I frequently use cognates even when they might sound a little strange in English.’ ‘Are there times when that doesn’t work?’ his interviewer, Claude Peck, asked ...”

“... thriller with allegoric overtones. It’s presided over by the spirit of an enigmatic ex-diplomat, Arthur Apple, a character once allotted a crucial role in a tableau set up by M.S. Power. Arthur Apple formed half of an ill-assorted pair conjoined in death. A similarly incongruous dead twosome is mentioned at the start of ...”

“... received, however. Lytton Strachey always greeted Carpenter’s name ‘with a series of little squeaks’ and, according to Rowbotham, ‘disdained the Carpenterian simple life nearly as much as heterosexual copulation’. Of all the young men who came to stay, the one who left the most interesting account was a rich and rare young American, Chester ...”

“... in getting round. Monty was particularly good at making ghostly noises.’ There is something a little obscure about this, and any fellow of King’s disposed to involve his pupils in it today would clearly have to clarify the rules. But in the story there lingers something of the ethos of an earlier age, when teachers and pupils in a Cambridge college were ...”

“... Watched from a safe distance, Arthur Koestler’s life was like a Catherine-wheel breaking free from its stake. Leaping and spinning and scattering crowds, emitting fountains of alarming flares and sparks as it bounded in and out of public squares and unexpected back gardens, flinging dazzling light into dim minds, Koestler’s career left scorch marks and illuminations across the 20th century ...”

“... science and it remains a unique quarry of ‘statistics of poverty’, recording how much (or little) Whitechapel widows got paid for glueing a gross of matchboxes or how they fed a family of 14 on a few coppers a day. There is also the more personal testimony, essential for any historian concerned to capture ‘experience’ but hard to handle: nostalgic ...”

“... but he might just as easily have made Faramus the central character. Chapman was patriotic in an Arthur Daley sort of way, willing to rally to the cause but always on the qui vive for dodgy little earners, a theft here, a con trick there. He was unfaithful to any number of women, robbed people he was quite fond of ...”

“... addition to the three-volume official life published by his former private secretary, Sir George Arthur, in 1920, a host of shorter studies and several investigations into the circumstances of his death. The present offerings add remarkably little to the body of knowledge about Kitchener already available. Philip ...”

“... and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not have been a man of genius.’ Too often, reviewing was an annex of ...”

“... cherrystones at one another. John Dee, the Elizabethan astronomer and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. Francis Segar, trying to teach decorum in 1557, criticised those boys who came out of school ...”