“... 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 ...”

“... the baggy pants, is trying to retrieve lost romance (the daft ha’p’orth) by consorting with a young woman who operates a word-processor. It is partly because of her rival’s occupation that Winnie, mistress of the word, or at least of the word inwardly spoken, the phrase rounded in silence as one rolls the pastry or cleans the oven, paradoxically ...”

“... was, he asserted, the people’s choice. The Times followed up the next day with a hatchet job by Arthur Mizener, entitled ‘Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?’ It was, Parini concludes, ‘a sorry moment for American literary culture’. A friend of the author’s declared himself outraged that ‘Americans weren’t rooting for ...”

“... attacked by a storm cloud of pot and BO.’ Another way of saying that the audience is (Gr-rr-r) young. It’s hard to see who made Osborne a writer. In working-class childhoods the Curtis Brown role generally falls to the mother, but not apparently in this case. A colleague of his mother’s, Cheffie, cast him as a future ‘thousand a year man’. This was ...”

“... sheep stations in the outback. The whole experience shaped the rest of his life. As a bespectacled young jackaroo just out from England remarks in his novel The Belle of Toorak (1900): ‘I shall come back to these paddocks in my dreams. I can’t tell why, but I feel it in my bones; it’s the light, the smell, the extraordinary sense of space and all the ...”

“... recalls attending a debate over the relative merits of nuclear power and coal with her husband, Arthur, president of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1981 to 2002. The scientist who was arguing for nuclear power had brought a rod of uranium in a plastic case and a piece of coal. He showed each to the audience, then held up his hands to demonstrate how ...”

“... had come to respect him as a Roman Catholic pacifist, a Nobel Prizeman speaking measured words to young idealists. We may have forgotten the work of his youth, the two post-war novels based on his experience of service with the German Army in Russia. The 22 stories in The Casualty were written in the immediately post-war period, 1946 to 1952, so that they are ...”

“... some equilibrium – not a matter of forgiveness – was regained between the two friends. When Arthur Martin, the investigator, rang the bell, they were talking about Cézanne. Blunt was disgraced, Long more grievously hurt, and Straight, after enjoying some quite respectful attention from the mass media, was eventually rubbished by the Sunday Times as ...”

“... Ford, an appealingly talented and gossipy subject, has naturally attracted biographers. In 1971 Arthur Mizener’s The Saddest Story seemed adequately exhaustive, but now Max Saunders comes along with two vast volumes, even more thorough and more than doubling the page count. Alan Judd, faithful to Ford’s own lack of respect for academic pieties, brought ...”

“... period films I hadn’t seen, an elegant and slow movie about the Italian romance of a no longer young American woman played by Katharine Hepburn. It was shot entirely on location in Venice, and Rossano Brazzi as the love interest comes a distinctly poor second to the city. Lean and H.E. Bates had taken an Arthur Laurents ...”

“... suppose, not surprising that left to themselves in a remote Indian village with little to do, the young theorists’ fancy would lightly turn to thoughts of theory, but the involvement of the book with economic theory is more fundamental – and more weighty – than that. Indeed, it provides the motivation for the entire study. Chapter Three, called ...”

“... else is known against this great under-achiever? Anne Edwards tells us that he was a crony of Lord Arthur Somerset, who was allowed to flee the country after being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the ...”

“... disastrous for both Henry’s reign and her own liberty. In 1173, Eleanor’s sons, Henry ‘the Young King’, Richard (later called Lionheart) and Geoffrey of Brittany, rebelled against their father, encouraged by Louis VII. Most chroniclers agree that Eleanor supported their revolt. Why she did so isn’t clear, but Henry was publicly unfaithful and the ...”

“... Ireland, beginning with the first non-stop transatlantic flight, made in 1919 by John Alcock and Arthur Brown. McCann reconstructs the perils of the journey, the freak weather and mechanical trouble, as well as the ‘genius and magic’ needed to see them through. The chapter is high on technical detail and period slang (plenty of Great Scotts and ...”

“... a rockface while tending goats. He spent his teens wandering Central Europe with a group of other young vagabonds, looking for an education and surviving by stealing geese. Starvation was a constant threat: he was 29 before he could be sure of not going hungry. Plague was a worse killer, and one that often ravaged entire towns. Thomas himself seems to have ...”