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“... 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 ...”

“... 295 of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A.J.P. Kenny critically examined Arthur Danto’s notion (approved by Chomsky) that there might in principle be such a thing as a ‘Spanish Pill’ which (given the structure of the human brain) would have the property of endowing those who swallowed it with a mastery of Spanish. A knowledge of ...”

“... are not as easily laughed off. Anyone who has read Eating people is wrong and who knew the late Arthur Humphries (professor of English at Leicester, where Bradbury got his first degree) must suspect that the novel’s hero, Stuart Treece, is a portrait from life. Nor could one believe that the portrait (although it is not at all malicious) furnished its ...”

“... by his compatriots. Thirteen ships departed in 1698 and only three returned, ‘laden not with gold, but sick men and women’, undermining Scotland’s already weak economy to the point where union with England was a matter of desperate financial need. Clamour for union had grown throughout the 17th century, with Scotland and England’s shared Protestant ...”

“... backstage at the Haymarket, ‘ready dressed in a handsome silk stocking, with a polished shoe and gold buckle’. It was jokingly referred to as ‘the most wooden member of the company’. Foote gave 56 performances that summer, a punishing schedule even in normal circumstances. Pain, stress and exhaustion were the unwritten story, which can be read, or at ...”

“... lowered, led The child I was to a shut door. Inside, Blinds beat sun from the bed. The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise. Under a sheet, clad in taboos Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread, And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old Engravings where the acid bit. I must have needed to touch it Or the whiteness – was she dead? Her ...”