“... Albion, Duncan Grant with his lush pictures of blooming countryside – Piper wasn’t afraid of a little darkness. In the ARP regional control centre in Bristol he found modernist typography stencilled on the walls, moodily lit corridors, ducts, arrows and piping. He loved it all. His paintings from the scene look like stage sets for a nightmarish play about ...”

“... bravery and money. Though Lafayette was a general in name, his role in the army initially had little to do with actual fighting. When the signing of a Franco-American alliance in 1778 brought thousands of French soldiers and sailors to the United States, he established himself as an intermediary. Americans – especially New Englanders – were intensely ...”

“... who believes he would now be a strong Thatcherite, John Wain, who invokes Orwell as an opponent of Arthur Scargill, or in America Norman Podhoretz, who feels sure he would be taking his stand with the ‘neo-conservatives against the Left’. The New York Tribune, Rodden notes, went further and called Orwell the father of neo-conservatism. These intellectual ...”

“... for economic growth. In any case, as William Brown asserts in a complementary chapter, ‘very little in the history of energy allows confidence to be placed in statements about long-term future developments’ and as yet unrecognised unconventional sources of energy may well emerge. Meanwhile, the case for nuclear power is put strongly, with the emphasis ...”

“... in a house in Bournemouth called Sunny Lawn. She was not a masculine-looking child; Sir Arthur Sullivan called her ‘Toddles’. But Toddles suffered deeply from the division between her rarely-seen father and her violent, hysterical mother. (The bewilderment of children growing up without love was what she was to do best in fiction.) In 1901, with ...”

“... rough man. The exasperating aspect of Eric Hammond is there – an occasional tendency, as with Arthur Scargill and latterly Mrs Thatcher, to speak of himself in the third person, a rather pleased way of saying: ‘Hammond wasn’t having any of that.’ So, more seriously, is his dedication to quarrelling. For better or worse, this union in its modern ...”

“... Weegee, aka Arthur or Usher Fellig, invented a certain kind of photography. His pictures of New York street life – crime scenes, car wrecks, society girls, circus freaks, racegoers, rough sleepers, fire victims – were intimate and direct. He used a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera, preset for instant shooting to 1/200th of a second at f16 with a focal distance of ten feet ...”

“... he quoted in a letter. ‘Isn’t that a beautiful statement?’ One reviewer of his 1939 show at Arthur Tooth’s gallery said that Ravilious’s childlike power of observation was more important than his fine draughtsmanship, that he made you see the ‘wiriness of wire’. Ravilious did love wire, and telegraph poles, ropes, chimneys, masts, leafless ...”

“... who could not be ignored or overridden. They either had their own power bases in the party, like Arthur Henderson or Herbert Morrison, or in the unions, like Ernest Bevin, or had a political standing, like Aneurin Bevan or James Callaghan, that made them to some extent proof against their leader’s displeasure. With the exception of Gordon Brown, and ...”

“... lunch in the Twentieth Century Fox commissary. She passed on greetings from her husband, Arthur Miller, and later said: ‘he looked at me the way a man looks on a woman.’ The studio head Spyros Skouras took Khrushchev on with an argument about capitalism. Judy Garland wanted more drinks. Elizabeth Taylor said she wouldn’t have missed it for ...”

“... adventure At the Mountains of Madness, is a studious appropriation of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.Lovecraft’s genteel prose coexisted with an intense racism, and reappraisals of his work have had to square the visionary intensity of the writing with the prejudices of the fearful, paranoid man who produced it. He is in this way (and maybe ...”

“... On 15 September​ , 26-year-old Arthur Medici was killed by a great white shark off Newcomb Hollow Beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He was thirty yards from the shore, boogie boarding, when the shark attacked. A witness says that everything was calm until he saw ‘a giant eruption of water’ and then ‘a tail and a lot of thrashing ...”

“... Surrender, the last of the Sword of Honour trilogy, ends with Crouchback’s brother-in-law Arthur Box-Bender noting not unresentfully that ‘things have turned out very conveniently for Guy.’ The same note of unexpectedness compounded of irony, farce and a tinge of shame is present in Segre’s rich and consummately-narrated ‘Italian ...”

“... us what we really need to know about the meaning of life and the universe when we are ready (see Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick). Or – another benevolent scenario – they are like those concerned parents who would, we’ve been told, have prevented the recent earthly riots. They have already stepped in, alarmed at the way earthling civilisation is ...”

“... of the Headmaster, whose retirement is the occasion for the presentation of ‘Speak for England, Arthur’, the play within the play. The memoirs of T.E. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf occur in the original script and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple ...”