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“... born of Boers. He was also, we soon realised, gay. After a while he introduced a young friend, Arthur, who came around with him and learnt his trade, devotedly watching Villiers as he fixed our errant Windows, e-mail and printers. One day Villiers let us down even more badly than usual and I was getting ready to fire him when I ran into my predecessor. You ...”

“... of course, it was often more tetchy, but appearances were decently kept up. No one supposed that Arthur Balfour, that inveterate political animal, was weary of politics when he pulled out in 1911, as he showed by insinuating himself into most of the Cabinets formed during the next twenty years. Like-wise, Austen Chamberlain’s displacement as Conservative ...”

“... in areas where higher-grade coal is available, because they produce a lot of smoke and relatively little heat (they are also difficult to transport and store, not least because they can spontaneously combust). Next comes bituminous coal, or steam coal. Dark brown or black, and usually layered or banded, steam coal is widely used in electricity generation (by ...”

“... anatomists before entering politics), of his break with Lloyd George in 1921, when he joined what Arthur Henderson in 1917 called the long and interesting list of former ministers waiting to tell the truth about Lloyd George (Addison waited less long than Henderson), and, above all, of the origins and passing of the 1931 Agricultural Marketing Act. ...”

“... An ignoble plot-engine, you could say, though one that has been deployed by narratives from King Arthur to Star Wars. Freud called it the ‘family romance’. Stylistically, the books sprawl; Rowling’s prose is laden with adverbs and adjectives, and on any one page characters might speak ‘sharply’, ‘curiously’, ‘impatiently’ and ...”

“... Willie Hopkin first caught sight of D.H. Lawrence in his pram, he thought him a ‘puny, fragile little specimen’. Forty-four years later the fragile specimen died, reduced by tuberculosis to a weight of 90 pounds. It is understandable, then, that Jeffrey Meyers should make much of Lawrence’s ‘lifelong invalidism’, and conclude his biography with an ...”

“... beauty, and even if the translation by the American academic, Professor Seidensticker, conveys little of the flavour of Murasaki’s style, this text has none of the omissions and embroideries of the beautiful Arthur Waley version completed in the inter-war years. The various psychological dramas that evolve among these ...”

“... of stagflation, one is tempted to refer to a book by a distinguished US economist, the late Arthur Okun: Prices and Quantity, published a little before the Meade volume. Okun shares Meade’s preoccupation with the diversion of nominal demand into price and wages increases at the expense of output and employment, but ...”

“... or at the shockingly brutal Northern ‘school’ where the hero is sent to die), and if he has little of Dickens’s generous sympathy or (consequently) humour, he is pretty much his equal as a documentarist. All the same, while reading The Quincunx I couldn’t help wondering what the novel would amount to – what would be left of it, in fact – if you ...”

“... made a will which disbursed sums that did not exist. In addition, Wilkes was a libertine. He had little or no religion, but an inclination for sexual adventures that lasted well into old age. In this respect, his apprenticeship was served in the Hell Fire Club, and he learnt his trade well. His life was all ‘blasphemy and bawdry’. Unlike some ...”

“... me that Lucas goes easy on revealing failure just because he likes nationalistic stereotyping too little to engage with it. What a strange character is Tennyson’s Arthur in Idylls of the King, for instance: the only Arthur since the 12th century not to be the incestuous father of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fight For all those gritty doctrines he has spoken On that day when they have to be renounced And Arthur Scargill’s strike bid must be trounced. But Arthur’s rhetoric is like his hair. Though spurious, transparent and bombastic, It’s legal and has some right to be there. The threat it poses to the state is drastic But ...”

“... not on public platforms), had always accepted the possibility of total surrender: it made little or no provision for partial defeat. Men as temperamentally dissimilar as Arthur Balfour and the 15th Earl of Derby had agreed that Pitt’s Act of Union provided a framework for the government of Ireland which ...”

“... When Malcolm Muggeridge and I were young we used to speculate about the end of civilisation. Little did we expect it would come in our lifetimes. I regard myself as a loyal member of the Labour Party. By this I mean that I usually disagree with what it does. Take the indignation against the cricketers who have gone to play cricket in South Africa. I am ...”