“... Human Rights.) He is the chancellor of the International Monarchist League, a theorist about King Arthur, and a four-time parliamentary candidate for Ukip. According to The Making of the Novelist (2004), the first volume of his biography, excessive popular enthusiasm for the League of Nations, ‘self-indulgent expressions of concern for the poor’ and a ...”

“... picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James William Doyle, an uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle – was known as a meticulous historian, and the figures are vividly and accurately presented, using known 18th-century likenesses. Dr Johnson is holding forth, with the professional eavesdropper Boswell at his shoulder; Sir Joshua has his ear ...”

“... drove the swelling tide of revolution. Reading of them now, one is inevitably reminded of the young Russians of the same period and their excited dabblings in what their counterparts in the 1960s would call ‘alternative lifestyles’. Foster cites ‘feminism, socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-vivisectionism’ as beliefs impelling the revolutionary ...”

“... that the list had belonged to Eleanor’s suitor, now her husband. There is a suggestion that the young man’s persistent regard for cleanliness will keep him godly, despite his sudden elevation to rank and riches in the novel’s closing pages. Hughes notices how much of literary clothing deals only with feminine fashion, certainly in the period and ...”

“... felt he had been knocked about a bit. ‘Desmond MacCarthy took me to task severely,’ he told a young admirer back home in New York: ‘He’s the Grand Old Man of English criticism … now the publishers over there are advertising it as “that controversial volume”.’ Auden had endured controversy anyway since his move to the US shortly before the ...”

“... to write a tragedy about a character with a completely transparent or apparently Cratylic name, as Arthur Miller did with Willy Loman. Here the ‘wrongness’ of the name for its literary kind is a way of marking the adversarial relationship between Death of a Salesman and tragedy as traditionally practised and conceived. The name insists that Loman’s death ...”

“... of participants is impressive, especially the American delegation: the dancers and choreographers Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer ...”

“... against a Romano-British tyrant, Artorius, whom Williams seems to identify with the original King Arthur. There is an incursion of the Vikings, the ‘black gentiles’, in AD 896: they fight the Cymry according to the rules of war – and a lower-class local is angry to see his leaders chatting, in sportsmanly, fair-play style, with ‘the Black ...”

“... the Communists, CND and (more frequently, more satisfyingly) real people – General Galtieri, Arthur Scargill, Ken Livingstone, Gerry Adams, Colonel Gaddafi, even (though they were beginning to scrape the barrel) President Delors. Peter Preston may not be in quite this league, more a domestic Jean-Luc Dehaene, but at least he is unequivocally an ...”

“... John Hayne of Exeter pursued Susan Henley with godly vigour in 1634: his presents included Arthur Hildersham’s Lectures upon the Fourth of John, a Bible and two books of sermons, as well as ribbons, gloves and green silk garters. A wedding was more than a private transaction: the banns were asked three times before the assembled congregation, seeking ...”

“... and colleges; and who is going to care any longer if the cobwebbed texts set before the nation’s young rather signally fail to display ‘largeness of soul’? One who will care is John Lucas, who thinks that ‘the 1960s witnessed a disaster for English education, one we are still living through and from which we may never entirely recover,’ and ...”

“... their own benefit. None of these, though, is representative of his profession – and only people young enough to be cynical believe them to be so. The number of dishonest scientists cannot, of course, be known, but even if they were common enough to justify scary talk of ‘tips of icebergs’ they have not been so numerous as to prevent science’s having ...”

“... another chapter in the “God-that-failed” saga’. That, I think, is unfair. Unlike Arthur Koestler, Camus was not performing a public autocritique of his past as a Communist, but trying to put utopian politics in its place. ‘Politics,’ he insisted, ‘is not a religion; if it becomes one it becomes an inquisition.’ Only those who believe ...”

“... oral history ward. If the old identify too closely with the ideas and emotions of the past, the young have difficulty in understanding them at all. If their politics descend from the radicalism of the 1970s, they find the assumptions of someone like Attlee or Bevin antiquated and hard to explain historically. How could a left-wing government have invested ...”

“... verdicts – although these latter, publicly pronounced, might be negated in private later on. Arthur O’Shaughnessy (a fellow-worker in the Museum, and the poet who believed that deathless ditties build up the world’s great cities) is ‘the most blameless of gentle spirits’ and also ‘that poor idiot’. These are not quite irreconcilable ...”