“... seeing them as more interested in personal power than state-building. Even so, the archaeologist Max Adams argues that England might have formed around a dominant Mercia, had other factors not intervened. Charlemagne’s letter to Offa, written in 796, addressed him as merely ‘king of the Mercians’, but Offa’s Dyke surely reinforced a sense of England ...”

“... was that the epigram was not true: Palestine already had a people. On belatedly discovering this, Max Nordau, Herzl’s 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 ...”

“... causes left’? Until the birth of the English Stage Company, the post-war British theatre was, as Arthur Miller has said, ‘hermetically sealed off from life’ – and from the American theatre. When Look Back in Anger was produced Miller had written Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and All My Sons, Tennessee Williams The Glass ...”

“... 1929, the Labour politician John Strachey (Oswald Mosley was best man); second, in 1935, Chester Arthur III, known as Gavin Arthur, the spoiled grandson of the 21st American president. Both men seem to have married Murphy – dubbed by New York papers the ‘Bachelor Heiress’ – in some portion for her money: Strachey ...”

“... in his prime and the myth was developed and embellished in the books of former lieutenants like Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen. It has only really been in the past decade that the revisionists have gained the upper hand and Kennedy’s record has been compared unfavourably with those of his two predecessors, Truman and Eisenhower. Even his two ...”

“... war’s first casualty. Before the First World War, the Greenwich Village rebels Randolph Bourne, Max Eastman and John Reed regarded themselves as nationalistic liberators willing to draw on the country’s intellectual traditions. Eastman defined himself as an ‘American lyrical socialist – a child of Walt Whitman reared by Karl Marx’. But with ...”

“... that we have in the end to believe that Plantagenet Palliser, Glencora, Lizzie Eustace, Madame Max, Phineas Finn and all the rest of the gallery were as real to him as Joan of Arc’s voices, Blake’s angels or Elwood P. Dowd’s giant white rabbit, Harvey. Trollope’s obsession about his characters originates in the kind of trauma that classically ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for posterity. Typically, the speculation shadows the spirit of the age. In 1904, influenced by Max Nordau’s theories of racial degeneration, A.C. Benson ascribed the pervasive Tennysonian gloom to a strain of ‘dark Southern blood’ tainting the predominantly Scandinavian stock of the family. In 1923, Harold Nicolson, persuaded by Strachey’s sardonic ...”

“... alight. His status as the greatest scientist since Newton was acknowledged in 1920 when Arthur Eddington presented the results of observations made during a total eclipse of the sun the previous year, which showed that light does indeed ‘bend’ in the vicinity of stars and planets, thus confirming the general theory of relativity. On 6 April ...”

“... demystifying the landscape they are usually thought to have taken a decisive step towards what Max Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’. Generations of historians have accordingly seen the Reformation as a milestone on the route to the Enlightenment and modern secularism. Protestantism, they claim, was a newly hatched rationalism running ...”

“... The final long elegy in the book, ‘A Gramophone on the Subject’ (the phrase is from Arthur Conan Doyle), is written for the parents of dead soldiers, a commission from the Poetry Society for a volume commemorating the Great War. It ends with a comment on plain style:So many gone that you can’t take it in.Whatever I say is bound to sound flat.I ...”

“... included von Neumann, the physicist Eugene Wigner, the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the novelist Arthur Koestler. Michael attended the Minta, qualified as a physician, served as a military doctor during the war, and, having had himself baptised, married a Catholic. (Polanyi’s maternal grandfather had been the chief rabbi of Vilna, so that was a rapid ...”

“... by a Tory, Ralph Harris, later ennobled by Thatcher as Lord Harris of High Cross, and the Liberal Arthur Seldon. Elliot Dodds, president of the Liberal Party in 1948, celebrated the party’s diverse heritage of anti-collectivism, chairing the Unservile State Group set up in 1953 to renew the Liberal conception of liberty. One member of the Group, the ...”

“... the task of an acknowledgment page. A note had better be a note – that is, a paragraph or two, max. And contain information – several facts per sentence – that may be ‘tucked away’. Any one of these otherwise innocent textual members may be misused: for instance, when E.E. Cummings bestows a dedication on all the publishers who have rejected his ...”