“... 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 ...”

“... of the winners is a matter of vital importance.’Capital in the 21st Century, however, had very little to say about this ‘essential truth’, which we might call the problem of legitimacy. Instead, it provided an exhaustive description of the evolution of income and wealth inequality in industrialised countries over the last two hundred years. Its main ...”

“... by panicking listeners falling downstairs and jumping out of windows in an effort to escape the little green men. The newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, calling for more government regulation of radio, much as they do now for television. When the Mercury Theatre’s Danton’s Death opened to mixed reviews the following week, they were quick to ...”

“... and energy, was a model for the blood-sucking count. Certainly Stoker’s dedication earned him little affection or respect. His friend the Manx writer Hall Caine said that he had ‘never seen, nor do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for ...”

“... the Ashmolean’s collection of copies of Greek antiquities, recently acquired by its keeper, Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the palace of Knossos. Several objects, including a fragment of a mural showing a wasp-waisted Minoan jumping over the horns of a bull, she revisited again and again. ‘He seemed not to leap, but to hang above the bull, like a ...”

“... Friends and contemporaries at the Royal College took inspiration from jazz, spirituals and rumba (Arthur Benjamin), or studied the Second Viennese School and the French group Les Six (Arthur Bliss), but Gurney seemed uninterested in the new music coming out of Europe and America, or even in the English folk revival. He came ...”

“... gaol has ever boasted to visitors that his notorious dungeons were chosen as the setting for Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But for over thirty years successive generations of BBC producers escorting guests through the labyrinthine corridors of Broadcasting House past doors bearing inscrutably coded designations have cheerfully informed them that ...”

“... education holds the key to the motivation of the moles. Burgess’s predatory homosexuality does little more to explain his recruitment to the NKVD (as the KGB was known from 1934 to 1941) than Philby’s athletic heterosexuality. The NKVD probably found both rather disconcerting. Generalisations about the ‘Cambridge Comintern’ based on the eccentric ...”

“... a magnificent library, formed the principal nucleus of the Museum founded after his death in 1753. Arthur Macgregor, who has previously co-edited an important work on the history of museums, has gathered here a series of essays by current and former staff of the British and Natural History Museums, who use the 30 extant manuscript catalogues of Sloane’s ...”

“... The Misery Index​, a crude measure of economic discomfort, was thought up by Arthur Okun, a neo-Keynesian who chaired Lyndon B. Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers in the late 1960s. Okun’s formula simply added together the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation. A good Misery Index might be about 5 (2 per cent inflation and 3 per cent unemployment); Britain’s currently sits at 8 ...”

“... perfectly in place, and legs that were perfectly designed for emerging from skirts that were little more than a pelmet. But – oh what a waste of temporary good fortune – none of that mattered. My 17th birthday present was a haircut at Evansky’s, as stylish a hairdresser as Vidal Sassoon at the time; the place where hair was cut into the essential ...”

“... can be indifferent to dogs, in representation or in the street – not the English. ‘Toto: that little yapping hairpiece of a creature, that meddlesome rug!’ He doesn’t like Glinda, the Good Witch, either; the Wicked Witch of the West receives his appreciative notice. This is the old, perhaps oldest, story: that of Satan attracting greater interest than ...”

“... of the services of such invaluable allies as General Galtieri, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and ‘King Arthur’ Scargill? And was there anyone at Tory Central Office so absurdly optimistic as to foresee the hilarious shambles which would be made of itself by the so-called ‘Alliance’? Yet I wonder. Asquith’s long tenure as prime minister also owed much to ...”

“... with the boilerplate blandness of the three titles, which might have escaped from the pen of Sir Arthur Bryant and fail to convey the impish iconoclasm and acid acuity that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively ...”

“... stuff outside one of the houses, a rise and fall French light fitting, white pottery shade, a little battered, but with the counterweight intact. It’s a nice find, though, like its ex-owners, we don’t need the fitting, but if we did … It’s cheering for R., who’s in turmoil over developments at the magazine and has pretty much decided to ...”