“... 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 ...”

“... are now virtually unheard of. Sometimes weeks go by without a meaningful vote. Many MPs have young families to whom they are anxious to return, and constituents and constituency parties expect a great deal more from their elected representative than they used to. Long gone are the days when an MP could get away with a quarterly visit to his ...”

“... classicism designed to negate the lachrymose effusions of the previous generation’s romanticism. Arthur Symons said of Gautier’s poems that they showed how ‘words could build as strongly as stones’, and wilfulness here carries the sense of chiselling designs out of uncut blocks, a description that captures something of Flaubert’s yelling out sounds ...”

“... of an elderly bibliophile. By the time of Holmes’s resurrection in ‘The Empty House’ (1903), Arthur Conan Doyle heartily resented his most famous creation, but vast amounts of cash had proved an irresistible lure. Doyle made no further efforts to bump him off; the best he managed was retirement. In ‘His Last Bow’ (1917), Holmes is called on to roll ...”

“... Eton and, by his remarkable wits, to Christ Church and the Bar. Upward mobility was available to a young man of talent, who soon ingratiated himself with the star of the day, William Pitt. Though he was an instinctive Whig, Canning’s ambition and admiration for Pitt took him over to the Tory side, and eventually into rivalry with Castlereagh. A reader could ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... now is simply an observation of the kind of times we live in and how attitudes develop among our young people. Over the last weekend I saw a movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was ...”

“... Spenser and Sidney. Both poems include fulsome dedications to the Earl of Southampton, a glamorous young aristocrat (he was 19 when Venus and Adonis appeared) who was also the ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This is the way ambitious Elizabethan poets got on in the world: they found a generous aristocratic patron, whose taste, praised in a lavish ...”

“... The Frenchman recalled a letter they’d composed after a consultation with the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen. ‘Could you tell Mr Arthur Andersen …’ it began. Andersen, the firm’s founder, had died in 1947. ‘They didn’t have a clue,’ the Frenchman said. They got a clue pretty quickly, however, and homed in ...”

“... once told me, into the ‘working-class squirearchy’ of the South Wales coalfield. His father, Arthur Jenkins, was a miner, who went down the pit at the age of 12, worked underground until his late thirties, and ended as president of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, a Labour MP and Clement Attlee’s PPS. In a haunting opening chapter, Jenkins brings ...”

“... are determined to read the historical sources sideways. They read romances and ask why King Arthur had to be bled in public. They read sermons on lust and ask what these imply about dormitory arrangements. The drive of their collective work is to inquire whether the Medieval psyche was at all like the modern one, or was inevitably altered by lower ...”

“... the drawing of benefit much more widely acceptable (for instance, among middle-class students and young people) than it used to be. But the clinching argument against either a trade union or a ‘poverty trap’ explanation of the rise in unemployment is that the latter is a common international phenomenon. It would be quite remarkable if there had been a ...”

“... left of ancient Rotherhithe’. He stalked twilight zones, dowsing for echoes of Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen and Thomas De Quincey. We are commuters, he wrote, ‘struck by a quarantine whose extent escapes our measuring instruments’. After wartime displacement to Bordeaux, and the horrors of typhoid, he returned to a shuttered ...”

“... how amply each can enrich the other. Take, for instance, his excellent chapter on ‘Joe Gormley, Arthur Scargill and the Miners’. If all historians during the miners’ strike of 1984-5 had shown such balance, knowledge of context and willingness to face unpalatable truths, their profession might have done more to reduce the dreadful suffering that ...”

“... The main business​ of almost all Jane Austen’s fiction is to portray that brief period in a young woman’s life when she is at the height of her charms and about to surrender them for ever to a more or less deserving suitor. During this period, she will encounter many examples of successful and unsuccessful marriage, but these are necessarily incidental to her concerns ...”