“... and the economy. Not so many know how much power they wield over the Government. The story of Arthur Andersen, and its burgeoning power, is especially interesting. Arthur Andersen is a proud survivor of the stampede of top accountancy firms to sue each other for alleged negligence in auditing and handling the accounts ...”

“... Harms has based his riveting account of the ‘worlds of the slave trade’ on a journal kept by a young lieutenant on the Diligent, Robert Durand, a document sold in the 1980s to the Beinecke Library at Yale, where Harms teaches. Historians have uncovered records of more than seventeen thousand slaving voyages in the 18th century, but, as Harms points ...”

“... ago; we are swimming in light, reflected on the sea. Just off the beach are three camper vans. Two young men come out, smoking cigarettes, looking as though they slept in their clothes. Further along, in a little park, I see two policemen talking to a small group who look as though they slept in the park. This reminds me again of my stay here in 1977, when the ...”

“... dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious manifestation of this is the unmistakable Barnes narrator, wheeling out a curious fact or historical anecdote, and treating us every few lines to a wry aperçu or humorous sally or teasing ...”

“... Arthur Benson​ never stopped dreaming about his father. Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped dead saying the Confession in 1896 – he sank onto his prayer cushion and didn’t get up again – but nearly twenty years later his son found him crouched in the cupboard under the stairs, dressed in his purple cassock and playing with some toys: ‘Papa … giggled; then he said: “But now that you have found me out, you must run down here as often as you can, and we will have a good game at something – You don’t know what fun it is ...”

“... call Primitive.’ (I have often wondered to what degree colour printing could have suggested the Young-Helmholtz trichromate theory of colour perception.) Gage comments: ‘So far from marking the beginning of a scientific aesthetic, the optical concerns of the Neo-Impressionists signalled its demise, and helped to usher in that disdain for the methods and ...”

“... Modern academic historians​ want nothing to do with King Arthur. ‘There is no historical evidence about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time ...”

“... child; this last baby, like Isabel’s first child, did not live. Margaret would have been too young to remember her mother, and it is likely that she was brought up within her father’s princely household, then after his execution lived with her cousins, the many daughters of Edward IV. After Richard III seized the throne, he sent Margaret to Yorkshire ...”

“... in Warsaw, telling him what a good girl she has been in fending off the attentions paid her by the young schlimazels on the train to Marienbad. Thus did Margery Pinchwife virtuously tell her old husband: ‘He put the tip of his tongue between my lips and so mousled me – and I said I’d bite it. He’s a proper goodly strong man; ’tis hard, let me tell ...”

“... their father’s financial difficulties, and his ebullient refusal to be defeated by them, the young Cloughs – Charles Butler, Arthur Hugh, Anne Jemima and George Augustus – learned to value independence and courage. Meanwhile, their mother equipped them with an appetite for learning, together with the scrupulous ...”

“... Great Chain which we find in Alexander Pope and which appears in a passage cited by Nisbet from Arthur Lovejoy: Vast chain of being; which from God began, Natures aetherial, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, No glass can reach, from Infinite to thee ... Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d; From ...”

“... and eyes scrunched up against the light. In the foreground, often cropped out, is her husband, Arthur. He is sitting down so you can’t see how tall he was. ‘They used to joke that 12 was their lucky number,’ their daughter Helen McKendry told me. ‘He was 12 years older than her, and 12 inches taller, and she had 12 pregnancies.’ Jean McConville ...”

“... us the domestic detail; records of the Artois courts give us a little more. Like many educated young men of the time, Robespierre cultivated his sensibilities. He wrote a little light verse. He was sociable, up to a point. He had women friends. He could easily have married. Except for his spectacular absent-mindedness – he once served the soup onto the ...”

“... acceptable, at least within the confines of our television sets, and as a result perhaps beyond. Arthur Daley and his ‘Minder’, for example, are commonly regarded as harmless, comic, lovable folk heroes, who can be forgiven even if they do sometimes wander onto the wrong side of the law, and get in trouble with ‘the Bill’. Indeed, both George Cole ...”

“... least, of the story of her heart. (There is also a contemporary diary of Minnie’s for 1862-63.) Arthur Benson wrote four and a half million words of diaries, a book of family reminiscences, a family genealogy, lives of his father, his sister Maggie and his brother Hugh, and a memoir of his sister Nellie. Fred wrote Our Family Affairs, Mother, As we Were and ...”