“... to haunt every desperate dream the characters devise for themselves. And being on the road in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman means the mirror opposite of Jack Kerouac’s travelling adventure. It means driving around failing to sell your goods in place after place till your car itself seems to want to commit suicide. ‘For a salesman,’ a ...”

“... escape Nietzsche; but Nietzsche has come after Blake, and will pass before Blake passes. That is Arthur Symons, who had all the qualifications, writing in 1907, in the wake of the Fin-de-Siècle rediscovery of Blake which was so important for Yeats. ‘No one can think and escape Nietzsche’ is just the sort of thing: ‘how profound!’ and ‘what ...”

“... distinguished by the rule of the party boss. The Conservatives had a whole dynasty of them: Sir Arthur Forwood, Sir Archibald Salvidge and Sir Thomas White. Even Labour followed the example thus set, in the person of John Braddock, a founder member of the Communist Party who lapsed into respectability. Perhaps one should include his wife Bessie in the ...”

“... Mozart had a discernible tendency to fall in love with his sopranos, Shaw something little short of a compulsion to fall in love with, first, women who took singing lessons from his mother and then, after he turned dramatist, his actresses. This must be one of the hazards of creating works of art that need executants to perform them ...”

“... great election of 5 April 1880, when Maurice Brooks, the Home Rule candidate, was returned and Sir Arthur Guinness, the Conservative, defeated. John Stanislaus had nothing against the Guinnesses as such, although he personally ‘had the pleasure of telling Sir Arthur he was no longer a member’. As he was to remark on his ...”

“... story’ of Passchendaele. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson are Australian historians who tell us, a little loftily, that ‘Great War studies have yet to escape their protracted adolescence.’ Their adult investigation is reminiscent of those relentless inquiries into scams carried out by district auditors, or DTI inspectors, armed with plenary powers and a ...”

“... everything from Browning’s dramatic monologues and the religious lyrics of Christina Rossetti to Arthur Clough’s The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich(1848), James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904-8). Though she has been considerably influenced by recent theorising, both linguistic and otherwise, Armstrong does ...”

“... of Project Zero at Harvard, includes puns and situation jokes as examples. Here he is following Arthur Koestler, but he does not altogether accept Koestler’s notion of Bisociation, expounded in The Act of Creation. This is the notion that we generally act within reference frames, and that creating involves relating normally independent ...”

“... sorrow.If we are reading the play rather than watching a performance, we may have been confused a little earlier, when the ‘scene’ is said to be ‘Troy and Los Angeles’. But then we are often in two places (or more) in the theatre, and there is no reason why one of them shouldn’t be imagined or mythical. Saving a tragedy from sorrow is a much more ...”

“... with his brothers and sisters To keep beyond fist’s reach of his dipso parents. His name was Arthur Stace. He had no one to use it apart from his family. His fate was to die as a man and return as a portent, Writing Eternity. His sisters grew up to be prostitutes. He was a pimp, But in 1930, in his early forties, on meths, He heard the Reverend John ...”

“... plugs, wires and phones which seem to be part of any modern hi-tech office, every man his own little Houston space centre. Dave had more gigabytes at his disposal than Apollo XIII ever did. Seeing my surprise he quickly explained the screens. ‘Tobacco is still a great crop to be in,’ he said, ‘but it can’t be the future: hell, I don’t smoke ...”

“... went with it. Yeats first met Beardsley at the launch party for the Savoy, the magazine founded by Arthur Symons and Beardsley after Beardsley had been fired as art editor of the Yellow Book following Wilde’s arrest. It was a brave and defiant attempt to continue the movement, but the journal was suspect from the start – the Savoy, after all, was the hotel ...”

“... things were worse than that. Only Raphael thought there was a battle. Raphael gets around to a little scepticism about the word ‘genius’, but rather late in the day, on page 158 to be precise. He is convinced Kubrick is a great director, but doesn’t do much to show us why, and while his epigrammatic analyses of Kubrick’s character are clever and ...”

“... anti-Conservative committee-rooms, as happened in the Vale of Glamorgan by-election in May; that Arthur Scargill would be seeking to become a fully-owned subsidiary of Ron Todd? Yet all this has come to pass, and so has industrial action by academics. That is, for me, the saddest development of all. Fashions may change in how best to run an industry or ...”

“... Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Toynbee, the ...”