“... the army. That was a great deal too smart for me. The law was allowed to be genteel enough; many young men, who had chambers in the Temple, made a very good appearance in the first circles, and drove about town in very knowing gigs. But I had no inclination for the law … As for the navy, it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the subject was ...”

“... in secrecy long after Kennedy was dead.For years, the accepted history of the crisis held that the young president faced down the Soviets’ reckless gamble with calm and unyielding resolve. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who knew better, summarised it: ‘The other guy blinked.’ This version stood unchallenged not least because it was sanctioned by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hands. The Trinity men soon attracted influential support: from the future Tory prime minister Arthur Balfour, from J.J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron) and from the distinguished physicists Oliver Lodge and Balfour Stewart. Since then the links between scientific heroes and psychical research have always been close. In his foreword to the two ...”

“... as its shadow his prime creation in silhouette. But the subtitle is ‘A Biographical Study of Arthur Conan Doyle’, and the book in fact represents massive research (or ‘detection’) covering its subject’s life up to the publication of Micah Clarke, no more than a year after Holmes’s first bow in A Study in Scarlet. We learn that Alfred Aloysius ...”

“... well compensated, of Hamed Qassim, brother of the revolutionary leader Abdul Karim Qassim. Before young Ahmad left he hid his ping-pong table behind a wall at the family estate, so Aram Roston tells us in his biography The Man Who Pushed America to War (2008). The revolution cost Hadi the bulk of his fortune, but after a brief period of austerity in a small ...”

“... His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits. But Arthur doesn’t take it lying down: no longer a sportsman but still a man. Storey adapted his original novel for Lindsay Anderson, who directed the film, but he curtailed the ending. On the printed page, after Machin’s legs have ‘betrayed’ him on the ...”

“... The poet of home and hearth, of family values and traditional roles, was a single mother. Captain Arthur Hemans had walked out of the family home in 1818, when his wife was pregnant with their fifth son. What’s more, her father had deserted her as well, leaving his wife when Felicia was a child. Felicia Hemans wrote for money, a vulgarity which compelled ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last finished film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her saying, ‘to everyone but me.’ In fact he couldn’t forgive her for having turned Miller into Mr Monroe. ‘Not ...”

“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... anti-fascist celebrities: Heinrich and Golo Mann, Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, Simone Weil, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first truthful biographer), Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Moïse Kisling, the young Claude ...”

“... wrestlers, as she supposes. During the siege of the Peking legations in the Boxer Rising, the young Pelliot showed himself an intrepid man of action, and on his return to Paris he was involved in a celebrated public brawl with someone who imprudently criticised his teacher. Marco Polo’s account of his putative travels is a highly problematic item for ...”

“... and ruin them. At the same time, there was a culture of male rakishness in the big city. The ‘young sports’, as they were known, were patrons of Anderson’s. Their interests lay in ‘the Sports of the Ring, the Turf, City life, such as Sprees, Larks, Crim-Cons, seductions, rapes’. When Mary died, Bennett’s paper promoted the idea that she had been ...”