“... particular talent is as much a tribute to the post-war grammar school as it is to the wonders of Little Richard. Brought up by the bookish and financially comfortable Aunt Mimi, Lennon was shaped by the conflicts of the bright working-class kid in the grammar crammer. Selected to make social progress and clearly intellectually able, he instead devoted almost ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and in mental and physical prowess, and a narcissistic conviction that they were born to lead. Arthur Balfour had led the parents, and Raymond Asquith set the pace and tone for the children, with Grenfell and the others soaring strenuously after him through Eton and Balliol, All Souls and the City, a confidently exclusive ...”

“... prayers for his release to the Twelfth Imam, the ‘Master of Time’ venerated by the Shia, by little reed boats launched on the Tigris.) The historian of Iraq Hanna Batatu delivers a more instructive account of the Chalabis’ adroit political manoeuvrings under the ancien regime in his exhaustive work The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... through a mysterious server somewhere in China (the actual means don’t really matter; as Arthur C. Clarke put it, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’), has found a way to make contact electronically with the past. But not with their own past, because at the moment of contact, a new timeline – known to people ...”

“... the second one, while doubtless a consolation to him, was a pinched and meagre affair that brought little joy to his partner. Furthermore, Hardy was a lifelong philanderer. Not a heartless philanderer: on the contrary, his heart was only too easily touched, by a wide variety of objects – humble admirers as well as society ladies, for whom he had a great ...”

“... Little has changed in the old city of Harar, secluded in the hills of south-eastern Ethiopia. The rusting military hardware still sits beside the road from Dire Dawa, as it did when I last passed by six years ago. The waiters still move like somnambulists through the drowsy lobby of the Ras Hotel. The spider’s web of twisting cobbled streets; the tall boys playing table football in a corner of the main square; the recumbent figures browsing on sprigs of khat; the beautiful eyes that flash suddenly out of shadowy interiors – it is all much as I remember it ...”

“... and renewing his decent grief.’ At the Coronation he notes the judges like red caterpillars, a little boy playing with his sword until his mother takes it away, urchins playing scratch cricket in a side-street as the crowd disperses; he saves his most withering asides for Archbishop Temple, so old that he can’t rise after doing homage, and, unable to ...”

“... about people having these kinds of readings of your work?TP: There was once a conference about me. Little me. It was in Rouen. All in French. Luckily I speak French. Although I understood French perfectly I couldn’t understand a word they said. It was in the middle of the high structuralist times. It was amazing. The gibberish. They took a text that my ...”

“... of the white pointy Klan hood can be dated precisely to 1905, to an illustration by someone called Arthur Keller for the play developed by Thomas Dixon from his novel The Clansman, in turn adapted by D.W. Griffith into his film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which featured heroic Klansmen riding across America in their billowing white garb. Life imitated ...”

“... traditionally abound. But this was not the case, and indeed these letters suggest that Taylor had little but contempt for undigested piles of archive masquerading as history. This was because his own archival realism was always harnessed to a more complex and idiosyncratic process, which some would see as constituting Taylor’s peculiar contribution to the ...”

“... the adults achieve anarchy. Because there are jokes on every page the bleak facts take a little time to emerge; and the very excellence of the television acting tended to make one miss them. Consider Adrian’s lot: his father is made redundant, and gets a job from the Manpower Services Commission cleaning a canal bank which every morning is strewn ...”

“... thinks) disadvantageous terms. What keeps her going is concern for her ‘boys’. The elder, Arthur, graduates as a tax-inspector, immune from call-up, and marries his landlady’s daughter in Ulster. Cliff, the younger, something of an ‘odd boy’ who writes poetry when depressed, is called up and shunted from one arm of the Services to another. The ...”