“... academic and the journalistic worlds’ of early 19th-century Edinburgh and London, though he had little time for Scottish professors. Indeed De Quincey, and Blackwood’s Magazine, seem to Lindop models of a virtuous compromise between journalism and scholarship; he thinks we should not allow ‘these poles to draw apart’, adding the names of contemporary ...”

“... 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan said: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 10. An experienced cabinet minister said in an interview: ‘I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give ...”

“... else is known against this great under-achiever? Anne Edwards tells us that he was a crony of Lord Arthur Somerset, who was allowed to flee the country after being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the ...”

“... For Professor Jacques Le Goff, it is a clue which helps us to understand the 12th century a little better. Le Goff, whose collected essays, written between 1956 and 1976, and published in French in 1977, have just made their appearance in English, is one of the liveliest and most stimulating historians at work in France today – no small praise at a ...”

“... friend and follower, exclaimed to his leader: ‘we are committing an injustice.’ Much later Arthur Ruppin, who directed Zionist colonisation in the 1920s, warned ‘that Herzl’s concept of a Jewish state was only possible because he ignored the presence of the Arabs.’ Undeterred, Zionists continued to implement what in other circumstances might have ...”

“... the visual arts. In these years, moreover, he remained ignorant about his own country, and he made little effort to increase his knowledge of the Empire or to keep it up to date. Having left India, after a flying visit, a few days before his 26th birthday, he declined to return. ‘There is much news of Anglo-India in my life,’ he wrote in July 1899: ‘it ...”

“... not only a distinguished academic economist but a former civil servant who knows the Treasury’s little ways. They have adopted a straightforward division of labour. Dr Burk is responsible for Part One of the book; Sir Alec for Part Two. Part One is a close account of the various crises of 1976, the decision to seek the assistance of the International ...”

“... apply to many of them (consider the bourgeois dictatorship of Napoleon III), while it makes little sense to say that the populist Nazis held aristocratic values and beliefs. Nevertheless, in the 1970s and 1980s this idea of modern German history swept all before it. As late as 1987, a doctoral dissertation at Bielefeld University on the Nazi policy of ...”

“... aluminium business, a cornerstone of the Mellon fortune, was, Andrew later admitted, managed by Arthur Vining Davis: ‘You might say that he was practically the whole business.’ Gulf Oil was overseen by one of Andrew’s nephews. The banking businesses were controlled jointly by Andrew and Dick, but they were advised by a succession of highly talented ...”

“... the sea nymph Thetis to the Argo, the first ever craft to enter water; also (fast-forwarding a little) to Theseus, who sails his own craft to and from Crete to kill the Minotaur, the sea’s monstrous offspring; and, finally, to Ariadne, whom Theseus abandons on Naxos on his way home, leaving her to while away her time by orgying with Bacchus. Steven ...”

“... the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes. Both writers, as it happens, are writing about Italy. Both writers use one word three times (‘green’ for Hemingway, ‘primroses’ for Lawrence), and repeat two other words. Hemingway’s passage is static. He is ...”

“... when talent and privilege meet. This book has several faults but at least one great merit: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have seen that Misia’s personality, even if it can never quite be captured, remains highly interesting for the light it casts on how talent can cohabit with gracious living and yet still keep its distance. Misia features a good ...”

“... steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of names, although since in this period the ‘proper’ name one gave to ...”

“... him. In writing of such things, how ever, he shied away from the sexual suggestiveness of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors. His innocent eye looked always for the whimsical, the curious, the charming; nothing he wrote in this kind has the creepiness of the best Machen. Whimsicality and conscious charm mark his first ...”

“... and then returned to the cart. Certain words are spoken. At the end, a shiny card is put into a little slot and taken out again, and a folded slip of paper is given to the people by the priest. The people depart into the world outside with their things. The anthropologist has come from another planet or another time, perhaps the time when Zola called the ...”