“... the occasional approach of ‘the ogres that were then still native to this land’. King Arthur is remembered not just as a legend but as someone it was possible to serve. Britons and Saxons live in separate communities but with a certain amount of overlap, any tensions kept below a simmer. You could describe events in the book as dreamlike, except ...”

“... gravel, two great charms’. To judge from such opinions, contemporaries like Horace Walpole and Arthur Young would have regarded the present cult of the country house with amazement and incredulity. Moreover, the life which was actually lived within their walls emerges as far from beguiling. Most country houses were cold, gloomy, eerie, filthy, smelly and ...”

“... ruddy cow. I wish to God I’d never seen you,’ husband bawls at wife. ‘What a ghastly little piece of nothing you’ve turned into,’ wife says to husband. ‘The old bastard is an absolute fake from start to finish,’ daughter says of father. ‘I’ve always thought you were a rotter,’ sister tells brother. ‘I wish that you and my mother ...”

“... who exploited those reports; close friends such as Ellen Nussey who defied Charlotte’s husband Arthur Nicholls and refused to burn the letters Charlotte sent her; even Charlotte herself, who, by reading her sister Emily’s poems, violated her privacy and thus allied herself with the intruders and the voyeurs. As a biographer and as a scholar of the ...”

“... career. Beatty’s contribution to Langtry’s biography is the discovery of letters to her lover Arthur Jones. Most of what we know of the woman is gossip-column scandal and her own heavily massaged memoirs. She destroyed her own papers, and told her story as she wished it to be heard. Arthur Jones may or may not have been ...”

“... he was inside. At her funeral one of his uncles, or so he later claimed, called him a ‘dirty little Jewish bastard’, and with no reason to stay in Odesa and every reason to leave, he set sail – possibly – for South America. Again, that was his story; no other records have been found that either confirm or disprove it.In December 1895 he reappeared ...”

“... Even in the 1930s MacDonald still imagined himself walking along, ‘holding the hand of my little boy in his dark blue jersey’. The outbreak of the First World War ended his first stint as Labour leader. Unlike the majority of Labour MPs, he was unwilling to support the Liberal government’s decision to go to war, which he saw as a consequence of ...”

“... as I’m different, don’t you think that, well, maybe things could be the same again? Only a little different?’ Too bad Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, with its reversal of the same thought (‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’), is too far in the future to be a source. It’s easy to believe, as Molly Haskell ...”

“... wars of Kenya and Zimbabwe have not shocked the average Briton (or even, it seems, Professor Arthur Marwick) out of a deep trust in some gentle, wise and enduring essence of ‘Britishness’ commonly equated with ‘Englishness’. Stedman Jones went on to point out that Fabianism was part of the continuous British political order, not adverse to ...”

“... 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 his latest openings. Benevolent, even comradely in a Jewish-1915 way, but would never think of saying a word, asking a word, about anyone else’s work … Caroline Kennedy (Schlossberg) was ...”

“... her friezes of silhouette figures look innocuous – a paper chain of dolls or an ornament by Arthur Rackham in a fairy story. Come a little closer and they start to distort and twist like faces in a fairground mirror. A portly, elderly gent is doing something unspeakable with a charming ...”

“... the trouble to disentangle the truth from the web of lies around Bitov, because his escapade is of little real significance. What may be of some importance, however, is Bitov’s background – his role as a representative of the middle echelon of journalists working on one of the most interesting Soviet newspapers, the Literary Gazette. This is not, as its ...”

“... imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is ...”

“... walk on,’ she wrote breezily in April 1882. Then, more ominously: ‘I could twist him around my little finger, that he would go off and kill somebody if I bade him.’ Poor Ned ambled around Amherst sporting a pussy willow that Mabel had given him in his buttonhole until the ‘fluffy blossom dried and dropped off’. But by the time he declared his love ...”

“... But by refusing to recognise the breakaway the TUC will appear to the public to be siding with Arthur Scargill. A third consequence, flowing from these two, is that the TUC – especially were it to split into rival political centres – will look an unconvincing partner for a Labour government whose expansionary economic policies are premised on a special ...”