“... asked. And Mosley then recited the names of those in high places who were opposed to the war. Little did Mosley know how justified his case was. For instance, on 28 May 1940 the War Cabinet discussed the question whether the British should appeal to Mussolini as an intermediary with Hitler. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was keen on this or as keen ...”

“... covers four generations and virtually the whole of the 20th century. First we learn of Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister in Paterson, New Jersey. Like many a minister in generations earlier than his, Clarence is undergoing a painful loss of faith, brought on by reading Robert Ingersoll’s Some Mistakes of Moses and other scornful and ...”

“... some equilibrium – not a matter of forgiveness – was regained between the two friends. When Arthur Martin, the investigator, rang the bell, they were talking about Cézanne. Blunt was disgraced, Long more grievously hurt, and Straight, after enjoying some quite respectful attention from the mass media, was eventually rubbished by the Sunday Times as ...”

“... tends to invert present and past, effect and cause. There’s a chapter that begins: Hermine and Arthur, his parents. He himself, Ludwig, the firstborn. His sister Elisabeth, married to Ernst. Their daughter Doris, his niece. Then his wife Anna. And now the children: Elliot and baby Elisabeth, named for his sister. This refrain (for that’s what it ...”

“... levels – Johann Strauss’s as well as Arnold Schoenberg’s, the Schnitzel’s as well as Arthur Schnitzler’s and Sigmund Freud’s – was bound to result in an attempt to explain it all, or most of it, or that part of it that has a hypnotic effect on the investigator himself. The question then naturally arises how far he has fallen victim to the ...”

“... In those days five piastres would buy at least three falafels. I stopped to pick up one of the little paperback volumes and, leafing through it, said contemptuously: ‘Five piastres for this?’ ‘No,’ came the quick reply, ‘take them all for five piastres.’ I ended up with a copy for half a piastre, and realised when speaking with my father about ...”

“... put his arms around Freda. ‘“I’m glad,” he said.’ One afternoon, Lewis read Aykroyd Arthur Koestler’s article on Richard Hillary, the fighter pilot and author of The Last Enemy. On 25 May Lewis had written to Gweno: ‘What twaddle of Koestler’s about him being wilfully led to a fascinating death!’ Now his voice cracked as he came to a ...”

“... in 1897 (it’s likely that he also administered the substance to his friends W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons), instead tended to focus on its visual effects. Ellis described ‘the brilliance, delicacy and variety of the colours’ and ‘their lovely and various textures’. Peyote reached Europe in tandem with the X-ray, cinema and electric lights, Jay ...”

“... When I came to study in Oxford in 1991, there were two stations. The working one, on top of its little mound; and another, fifty yards away, Oxford Rewley Road. Closed to passengers since 1951, it belonged first to the London and North Western Railway and then to the London Midland and Scottish Railway, whose name is marked on the frontage in old ...”

“... us witnessed Live Soccer on TV it was Juventus versus Liverpool in Brussels.In case this sounds a little over-sonorous, I ought to own up that on the night of the Brussels disaster, and for several days thereafter, my disposition was to defend ‘the game’ against sermonisers who seemed to be cashing in on what had happened: people who hated football anyway ...”

“... of the gods forestalled matricide by turning mother and son into constellations, the Great and Little Bear. Yet perhaps Diana herself did not get away with it? At the beginning of the passage in Metamorphoses where Actaeon blunders onto the bathing scene (a scene, as Brigid Brophy points out, which Titian represents as a stage, with players and ...”

“... is often the word he uses, as here, in his short poem (a free version of the Latin poem by Arthur Johnston) about St Andrew’s, where he has lived with his family and worked for more than twenty years: I love how it comes right out of the blue North Sea edge, sunstruck with oystercatchers. A bullseye centred at the outer reaches, A haar of kirks, one ...”

“... secretary as he went down with the Titanic, though this is difficult to prove. The poet and critic Arthur Symons argued – in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) – that shadowy flickers of worlds ‘unseen’ might be as real as the invisible ‘reality’ of the atom. The reign of the ‘material’ was over; now came the turn of a literature in ...”

“... draughtsmanship. For that he had recourse to an unidentified draughtsman he called “Arthur”, and more often to Nicholas Hawksmoor, upon whose professional expertise he relied for the realisation of all his major buildings.’ The engineers, Arups, are Rogers’s Hawksmoor, Laurie Abbott and others his ‘...”

“... to enter into death with open eyes.’ The translation of M. Galey’s interviews has been made by Arthur Goldhammer, working with the nervous precision demanded by his knowledge that Mme Yourcenar is herself a fastidious translator: she has translated The Waves and What Maisie Knew into French. With Open Eyes is an engaging introduction to her work, imbued ...”