“... 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 ...”

“... ensuring it was carried out: Marshall himself, William Clayton, Paul Hoffman, Richard Bissell and Arthur Vandenberg. All are portrayed as extraordinarily talented, dedicated and selfless individuals who acted out of a classical sense of republican virtue and, like Cincinnatus or George Washington, returned to private life at the first opportunity. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... day. Woolf himself had a long spell as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, and finding there very little society he was willing to describe as congenial, he sought consolation by correspondence with his Cambridge friends, especially Lytton Strachey. Later on, he wrote a multitude of letters as editor, publisher and politician. So it is not remarkable that in ...”

“... Ireland, beginning with the first non-stop transatlantic flight, made in 1919 by John Alcock and Arthur Brown. McCann reconstructs the perils of the journey, the freak weather and mechanical trouble, as well as the ‘genius and magic’ needed to see them through. The chapter is high on technical detail and period slang (plenty of Great Scotts and ...”

“... the brittle quality of the early work, or the rambling freedom of the long sequence. It feels a little thin and belated. On the other hand, it is quietly and consistently funny, and so full of Powell’s characteristic note that it may help us to see what that note is. Let’s start with what seems to be a difficulty. The book is written in a blurred prose ...”

“... Sometimes we call it plagiarism as well, ‘but that is a harsh word when one considers how very little there is in the way of character and plot to go around.’ The irony is a bit hefty, but the effects can be eerie and funny. The lady realtor – Heinemann’s text, one degree more post-structuralist than Vidal’s, calls her a ‘relator’ – remembers ...”

“... whom Hardinge had encouraged to do so much detailed work on redrawing the map of the world had little influence on the outcome. In part this was a result of Lloyd George’s belief that information may be power but knowing when to ignore it was essential to the successful manipulation of power. Instead of relying on Foreign Office expertise, he relied on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”