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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... confide in him that her late husband had a special fondness for a corny musical about King Arthur. But, as a staunch Camelot-scoffer all my life, I was in for a huge shock when Jackie finally died. Every American female I know took it entirely personally. My scoffs were absolutely at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old ...”

“... most impressive of the Young Turks to contest MacDonald, lurched into even deeper disgrace, while Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury were simply not memorable. Clement Attlee, the leader for twenty years and the man who led Labour to the new Jerusalem of 1945, was, in the event, the most serviceable hero, but he was never beatified, let alone canonised. Not ...”

“... are producing my Forty Years On. The title of the play within the play is ‘Speak for England, Arthur’ and the schoolboy cast hold up letter-boards to spell it out for the audience. Part of the stage-directions is that before getting it right, one or two of the boys should get their letters jumbled. One of the 18 local schoolboys doing it at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... public buildings must be due To precepts found in no official text, And least of all in Mao’s Little Red Book – Which you can’t buy however hard you look. Yes, Mao has been reduced from god to man. He’s back to being ordinary flesh. His mausoleum’s small extractor fan Must now work overtime to keep him fresh. The Party’s cranking out a whole ...”

“... and to side with the ‘genius of the system’; Stroheim’s reputation has suffered as a result. Arthur Lennig’s new critical biography is not likely to restore it. This is an old-timey book that calls to mind the film societies of another era, the noise of a 16mm projector at the back of the room, the smell of mimeographed programme notes. It tells an ...”

“... 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 ...”