“... to choose the most memorable entry, it would have to be that for 13 October 1660. Pepys, then a young clerk to the Navy Board, begins the day by calling routinely upon his cousin and master, the Earl of Sandwich, but his lord is not yet up. So what’s to do? ‘I went out to Charing cross, to sec Major-Generall Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered ...”

“... Francis Bacon was doing it too: Eardley and Bacon were included in a series of group shows at the Arthur Tooth Gallery in London in the late 1950s. The paintings that emerged from Eardley’s work with the Samson children are sometimes taken for ‘humane’ depictions of poverty, or for political statements. They are neither. Her marks both summon reality ...”

“... through her singing she met lovers from higher social circles, notably an upper-class Englishman, Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, who provided the encouragement and financial backing to establish fashion boutiques in Biarritz and later Paris.Zhemchuzhina (perl is Yiddish for ‘pearl’ and zhemchuzhina is its Russian translation) was born in 1897 in a Jewish shtetl ...”

“... in mind. These childish readers, when grown to rule the Empire, seemed to Santayana the sweetest young boyish masters the world had ever seen. The critics concerned with modern children’s fiction tend to see the sought growth in terms of identity problems: sometimes, of course, class identity, and especially pride in a working-class or ethnic ...”

“... cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which ...”

“... extrajudicial methods of government, and anxious to secure the smooth succession of his young son as well as their own place in the new regime, they needed scapegoats onto whom to ‘shift the noise’ of Henry VII’s ‘tyrannies’, as one contemporary chronicler put it, ‘for to satisfy and appease the people’. Empson and Dudley were top of ...”

“... feeling pessimistic about the outlook for the case. Even the fact that during her early years the young woman in question was becoming fluent in three languages besides her own, and reading assiduously and learning to write letters in an exquisite italic hand, scarcely counterbalances the accumulation of woes, or suggests that the sufferer might go on to ...”

“... knew he had a squeaky voice, but several other on-field heroes – A.E. Stoddart, William Scotton, Arthur Shrewsbury – killed themselves after their careers ended, unable to cope with the loss of fame and/or money. Audiences demanded swagger in music too, forcing that poor ambitious provincial Edward Elgar to respond with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. It was ...”

“... Looks’: ‘it’s not right to flare and quiver at some fictive “worldly boredom of the young”/through middle-aged hormonal pride of Madame, one must bleed, it’s necessary …/Mop mop georgette.’ God spare us the magnanimity of poets comfortable in their own skin:The writer/properly should be the last person that the reader or the listener ...”

“... through their rubbish. At the end of the 19th century, two Oxford academics, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, set off for the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in search of Greek texts written on papyrus. Over six seasons, assisted by scores of local workmen, they excavated thousands of papyri from the city’s rubbish mounds and transported them to ...”

“... there after demobilisation, in 1919, to resume his part in a quartet of friendship with Howells, Arthur Benjamin and Arthur Bliss. His siblings had also to contend with his burgeoning fame, which they did not understand: two published volumes of poetry (1917 and 1919); much performance and publication of music ...”

“... German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and ...”

“... a good deal.’ In form, Doctor Criminale is an old-fashioned quest novel. Francis Jay, a young British journalist – trained in deconstruction and cultural politics at Sussex – is left high and dry when his paper (evidently the ill-fated Sunday Correspondent) folds. Following a disastrous Booker ceremony at which he comports himself on camera ...”

“... early 20th-century lives, her correspondence with the Duke of Clarence was edited and published by Arthur Aspinall, and in 1965 Brian Forthergill produced a lengthy and appreciative study of Mrs Jordan as an actress. Why, then, has Claire Tomalin, a biographer who excels in the recovery of the lives of lost women, sought to tell again a story which has already ...”

“... expands into a social drama of heartache and struggle equal to the torments and terrors of Arthur Miller or David Mamet’s salesmen. As Zdatny explains and Long complains, hairdressers were at the bottom of a hierarchy of fashion, helpless in the face of the couturiers of the great fashion houses who kept their models’ hair short and simple so as ...”