“... to enter into death with open eyes.’ The translation of M. Galey’s interviews has been made by Arthur Goldhammer, working with the nervous precision demanded by his knowledge that Mme Yourcenar is herself a fastidious translator: she has translated The Waves and What Maisie Knew into French. With Open Eyes is an engaging introduction to her work, imbued ...”

“... was to serve for a short period as foreign minister under the Second Republic, with the young Arthur de Gobineau – the future racial theorist – as his loyal chef de cabinet. Even so, and high office notwithstanding, Tocqueville was already depressed by the turn of events in 1848. Ever since his trip to America, he had found some reassurance ...”

“... matter. When asked which parent was more responsible for the children’s success, JFK said to Arthur Schlesinger: ‘Well, no one could say that it was due to my mother.’ While Rose preached ‘responsibility’ to her children, Perry says, Joe became the fixer and ‘enabler of irresponsibility’ for his sons: he reassured ...”

“... and Heraclitus, and in Hölderlin, Hegel and Marx, and in James Hogg, is imparted to the young ones. He is the sort of Sixties dominie who keeps saying ‘fuck’ in class and inveighing against the system. His relationship with the kids is one between equals, but they also seem to expect him to be a wise man, and this is what he sometimes expects of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the robustness which made the news come as such a shock: ‘in terms of his marital situation [a young second wife] Paul might even have envied him – he was exactly the type of senior, he reflected, who was invariably shown in advertisements for funeral insurance plans.’ You can almost hear an authorial voice murmuring, ‘Oh, you like that? You won’t ...”

“... academics, who tend to equate sexual potency with critical creativity, there is a top man called Arthur Kingfisher, impotent despite the administrations of his Korean mistress until redeemed by young, naive Celtic virgin Persse, our hero, who goes to the MLA and asks the right question. There are twins, a true and a false ...”

“... of exotic ‘prayer’ shawl draped over his expressive shoulders, smoking away, talking to eager young girls. Mike Nichols, the serpent in the garden … Claggart to the life, said not enough money was coming in just now, wanted to get unused to the money. Arthur Miller a bit tight addressing me as usual on the subject of ...”

“... Bath’s Tale’, Chaucer has the Wife declare that her tale is set long ago, in the days of King Arthur. Back then the land was ‘fulfild of fayerye’, and the elf queen danced with her company in the green meadows. But that’s all over now. The elves and fairies have been driven out by the friars, who have blanketed the country with prayers and ...”

“... We don’t really know what it is or what it was for. In his new study of the manuscript, Arthur Bahr embraces the mystery, spiritedly chasing after a book that will never let us catch up. He suggests that it is ‘a pedagogical compilation’, cleverly designed to provoke readers into reflecting on the limits and possibilities of meaning-making ...”

“... flames, still recite sacred epics. But as time passed in the West, clever scissorwork became a young woman’s skill, and dropped below stairs; the bastard progeny of the paper cut are the doily and the cutlet frill. Yet Lotte Reiniger, a Berliner who died in London in 1981, adapted the craft to make experimental ‘shadow films’, as she called ...”

“... Exchequer, and Winston Churchill at the Board of Trade – and, down on the Bristol waterfront, a young carter called Ernest Bevin was getting himself elected chairman of a newly established carmen’s branch of the Dockers’ Union? The question gains added point when joined to the now fashionable question whether the current political dominance of Margaret ...”

“... its themes with time-consuming thoroughness and deliberation.Meanwhile, in Paris, a self-effacing young man of 22 – one of whose pieces of advice to composers would be to ‘keep it short’ – dashed off three miniature piano pieces, to which he gave the mysterious title Gymnopédies (it refers to a dance performed by naked ...”