“... bears little resemblance to the archetypal Irish revolutionary as sketched by Tom Garvin: a young man from the country, aspiring and impatient, frustrated of opportunities, working at a level below that befitting his education. His Mayo background, as the son of a solicitor’s clerk in Castlebar, remained hugely important to him, however, and when the ...”

“... incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously corpulent Matthew Arnold, was a dandy who enjoyed titles, women in smart attire, the company of a Rothschild, the compliments of Disraeli, the wealth of a Hudson River estate (where in 1883 he went to see Delanos ...”

“... well as the run-up to Mau Mau in Kenya) took place under another noted Fabian Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones. Ranger is at pains to insist that Zimbabwe’s road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism nor, as John Saul and Basil Davidson inferred in the late Seventies, an inferior version of Frelimo-style socialism in ...”

“... loathsome to her) reptiles. Melanie was the youngest of four children, of whom two were to die young, the third child Sidonie of scrofula at the age of eight and her adored brother Emmanuel at the age of 25, of heart failure brought about by tuberculosis and drug addiction. Emmanuel appears to have fantasised for some time about such an early ...”

“... this last, rather more characteristically, is initially presented as the arm of the boxer-poet Arthur Cravan who mysteriously disappeared in Mexico in 1918 soon after his marriage to Mina Loy. (Why, though, does he confound her with the actress Myrna Loy? Some impish joke I must be missing ...) The images of Muldoon’s parents inspired by the yarrow sprig ...”

“... charlatan, runs his opal mine out of town as a millenarian religious commune, importing ingenuous young back-packers as labour. They become his prisoners and slaves. Their cards and letters home never leave town. Small planes fly in secretly from Singapore to remove the gems. The whole community is implicated, from the big graziers to the woman at the ...”

“... probably the first European to enter this Muslim stronghold. The other is the nomadic French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who worked here as a trader in the 1880s, and who made the place – more than anywhere in his brief, restless life – his home. It was Rimbaud who first brought me here, when I was researching a book about his years in Africa, and it is Rimbaud ...”

“... this country to admire Paul Klee. He has a taste for ballet, for the plays of Sean O’Casey and Arthur Miller and the films of Eisenstein. He has contrived to be a lifelong socialist and a millionaire entrepreneur, to believe in democracy and have the reputation of running his company like a tsar. He is involved in many charities, here and in Israel. A man ...”

“... by the Sackvilles, was, in fact, a marriage of social equals. Nicolson was the younger son of Sir Arthur, 11th Baronet, later created a peer for his services in the Foreign Office as Permanent Under-Secretary 1910-16. Harold’s Hamilton grandmother owned a stately home in Co. Dublin. His uncle by marriage was the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Viceroy of ...”

“... Oxford from 1981 to 1989, his career has been all of a piece. The scholar, the actor, the dashing young subaltern and the Union debater, have all gone into the making of this extremely elegant and rather grand figure. In teaching, research and administration his career is a testament to the rise of a new professionalism in the Universities since 1945. But ...”

“... the US today it is reckoned that there are more poets than readers of poetry, and that many of the young poets read no poetry but their own. If that is true, the new poetry is mostly therapeutic, and belongs to the history of psychology rather than of literature. I have no idea whether or not Victorian poetry issued from significantly different motives and ...”

“... reviews of his production of Hamlet were so effusive that the acutely vain actor invited the young critic to meet him. At the end of 1878 Irving, by then actor-manager at the Lyceum, asked Stoker to come to London as front-of-house manager. It’s sometimes said that Irving, who exploited Stoker’s blind devotion to make outrageous demands on his time ...”

“... the Thirties; each was an important art-collector. But there the resemblance ends. Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor (1879-1953), Duke of Westminster – called Bend’Or from the family coat of arms – was the product of a landed Cheshire family whose estate, Eaton Hall south of Liverpool, dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour ...”

“... in the warrior bands of the barbarian kingdoms that succeeded Rome. The military service of young aristocrats in a lord’s household coincides with the beginnings of vassalage as described by Bloch, originating in an atmosphere heavy with the odour of household bread. The world of chivalry was a world where men were linked to each other by strong ...”

“... As​ a young researcher applying for a US visa to go to a conference in the mid-1960s, I presented myself at the fortress-like embassy in Grosvenor Square and ticked the boxes affirming that I was not nor ever had been a member of the Communist Party and did not intend to attempt to overthrow the US government by force ...”