“... 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 ...”

“... ambitious and glamorous musical numbers. These were produced by the so-called Freed Unit, led by Arthur Freed and staffed by brilliant choreographers, composers, dancers and musicians, many of them gay men (studio insiders referred to the unit as ‘Freed’s Fairies’). The most important person in the unit as far as Garland was concerned was Edens, who ...”

“... flow of books, films and other media. When Dreyer made his extraordinary film in 1928, and Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel composed the oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher ten years later, both were working in the light of modern wars and prejudice. And their works are prophetic: the civil war in 15th-century France presages the treacheries both of the ...”

“... made it part of the poem’. It is the great pleasure of encountering ancient Chinese poetry in Arthur Waley’s versions that ‘their glimpses of ordinary life communicate instantly across the centuries’; but then reading any great literature, as Carey says in the encomium with which he closes his autobiography, ‘makes you see that ordinary things are ...”

“... closed off by her security men. I see a couple of proprietorial Russians trying to ferry Arthur Miller to the graveside. Squeezing past, he steps apologetically on our toes in one direction and then again in the other direction – but gets no nearer the epicentre represented by Yevtushenko and the television cameras. Yevtushenko introduces each ...”

“... is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known head shots are from his twilight ...”

“... set off on Monday on another epic journey, the script, based on the Prometheus legend, is about a gold statue is transported from South Yorkshire (film of the demolition of some cooling towers near Barnsley) through Eastern Europe to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and ...”

“... cities – and the headquarters of the Customs were bound in red or black leather volumes, with gold-block lettering. Inside, dispatches and correspondence, in meticulous sequence, are as crisp and clear as when first typed; in their margins, the handwritten comments of an indefatigable Inspector-General and his assistants, or instructions for reply. Three ...”

“... campaign to vilify Casement, there was a public commission demanding a reprieve, spearheaded by Arthur Conan Doyle. The signatories included Arnold Bennett, G.K. Chesterton, J.G. Frazer, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, John Masefield and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. George Bernard Shaw also petitioned for a pardon – in fact, it would be hard to imagine ...”

“... the importance of unpaid work, most of it done by women. Guy Standing cites the economist Arthur Cecil Pigou and his thought experiment about women and work: ‘If he hired a housekeeper, national income went up, economic growth increased, employment rose and unemployment fell. If he subsequently married her, and she continued to do precisely the same ...”

“... Swedenborg said that he met these angels, and was received by them into their fine homes, full of gold and precious stones (‘like some favoured reporter from Hello! magazine’). Nowadays, if we are all Pelagians, then we are also all Swedenborgians. Casey plausibly argues that the Victorian craze for spiritualism – séances, ghostly ...”