“... best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad business, this little kindness, but now and then it proved a wise ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In his​ History of Great Britain, published in 1653, Arthur Wilson wrote: ‘I see no reason why princes (towering in the height of their own power) should think themselves so far above ordinary mortals, that their actions are to be incomprehensible. This is but a weakness, contracted in the high place they look down from ...”

“... Wyatt and Campion and Pope before it as certainly as, after it, it disregards Pound and the young Eliot. Such blank verse – the unrhymed, relentlessly regular pentameter – can be squeezed out like toothpaste, ignoring the audibie shape of any one verse-line or run of lines, because we are supposed to be attending to larger and more urgent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the first. These essays are, in fact, chapters in the intellectual and political biography of a young Croslandite (once a Bevanite) who became an increasingly bruised and disenchanted Labour MP, a founder member of the SDP, and who now (I imagine) stands between the Kinnockian Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. From the point of view of the reader ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”