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“... 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 ...”

“... Indeed, in many of these accounts, the stance of the daughter seems curiously to be that of a little girl; with one exception, the mother is perceived as distant and hard-working, of marginal importance, perhaps difficult to please. The father and the daughter are allies; the daughter writes with understanding, and with sympathy, of the father’s ...”

“... Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (...”

“... pints of bitter. Only one journalist was allowed into this bar, along with his guests. He was Mr Arthur Christiansen, the legendary editor of the Daily Express. To be asked to join him there was the ultimate accolade for an Expressman. The long, narrow bit was reserved for ordinary workaday hacks from both the Express and the Telegraph. But the surprising ...”

“... the Prime Minister?’ enquired Haggard hopefully, eager for Balfour’s reaction. ‘Oh Arthur won’t read it – you know, Arthur won’t read it.’ The Government decided to leave emigration to the existing agencies. Haggard would have been entitled to shake his head at other government approaches, but he ...”

“... women start getting their own back. Some of them even begin to turn into reptiles. There is very little sex with violence in Victorian Sculpture. In England the exhibition piece tended to melt the heart rather than race the pulse. If we leave aside the modesty and tenderness of numerous nymphs finely calculated to compensate for unholy ideas prompted by ...”

“... in the land. My father deplored Howard Johnson’s and the House of Pancakes, Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey, Leon Uris and Herman Wouk. When Dwight Macdonald’s famous essay ‘Masscult and Midcult’ was published in Partisan Review, he was ecstatic, chuckling over Macdonald’s assault on the pretensions of those contemptible middlebrows Thornton ...”

“... with titles like Salome Dear, Not in the Fridge! and became a jolly television games-player (yes, Arthur Marshall); another, who served in Intelligence, took to wearing bangles and a large diamond in one ear, and was barred from Wimbledon for designing too-saucy dresses for tennis women (Teddy Tinling); a third, who rose from private in the Honourable ...”

“... his efforts in securing democracy, freedom of speech and fairness was John Wilkes, the subject of Arthur Cash’s informative and enjoyable new biography. Now that ‘high politics’ is taught less and less in schools and universities, Wilkes’s great political achievements, which included lowering the tone of high politics, are less and less ...”

“... prose into a jaunty, surreal bawdiness (‘fancy him, darling?’): the effect is rather like Arthur Balfour voicing Sid James. ‘Enter toge,’ Chapter 1 begins, ‘wheeled slowly in by French and German ladies of vague conditions in life.’ Or: ‘he himself rated success in flesh to include dogs, rain rope, and also a certain condition of Asiatic ...”

“... Troy and the composition of the Homeric epics, or between the supposed post-Roman context of King Arthur and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. In each of these three cases, serious scholars still try to make the legend fit the archaeology and turn it into history. See, for instance, Joachim Latacz’s Troia und Homer ...”

“... temptation to give this high romance a touch of the demotic: It was Christmas at Camelot – King Arthur’s court, where the great and the good of the land had gathered, all the righteous lords of the ranks of the Round Table quite properly carousing and revelling in pleasure. Compare O’Donoghue’s: It was Christmas at Camelot, and there was the king ...”

“... theory. It is, I 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 ...”

“... become, in effect, a traitor to the cause. I took the latter path, pursuing eccentric interests in Arthur Hugh Clough and George Gissing, and developing a critique of fiction based on a very superficial reading of what I took to be Existentialist ethics, mauvaise foi and all that. For Leavis the study of English was intended to foster the critical ...”

“... When​ George H.W. Bush arrived in Washington as vice president in January 1981 he seemed little more than a sideshow to Ronald Reagan, the one-time leading man who had been overwhelmingly elected to the greatest stage in the world. Biography after inconclusive biography would be written about Reagan’s two terms, as their authors tried to square the many gaps in his knowledge with his seemingly acute political instincts and the ease with which he appeared to handle the presidency ...”