“... has not annihilated consequence. Or, more precisely, that Aids has reinstated it. Suppose that a young man who knows he is carrying the HIV virus has some sinister reason for sweet-talking the object of his desire into going to bed with him while saying nothing about his medical condition. It would be quite appropriate to call a case of this sort a ...”

“... to a basic fabric. Sometimes it is useful, as in the painfully acquired lettering which enabled a young girl to mark the ownership of goods. Perhaps one of the most conspicuous pieces of handwork, the embroidered arms of the alliance which won the battle of Lepanto – still to be seen on the great pale blue banner for Don John of Austria’s flagship, now in ...”

“... plays do survive – Thomas Drue’s The Duchess of Suffolk, Davenport’s King John and Matilda, Arthur Wilson’s The Swisser, or Glapthorne’s Albertus Wallerstein – and others preserve a sketchy existence through the records of censorship and prosecution. Massinger causes Miss Heinemann some difficulty. She (rightly) contrasts the fundamentally ...”

“... he returns to London and discovers that Mr Harcombe, last seen living with Gloria Patterson, a young woman compounded equally of beauty, vulgarity and spite, has fallen on hard times. He has lost his healing gifts, is living alone in a Notting Hill basement, and working as an astrologer. Timothy goes to work once more as his father’s assistant, and soon ...”

“... The new paper’s name was originally suggested, strangely enough, by the Conservative leader Arthur Balfour. He proposed the Statesman, and the New was added because a Statesman already existed in India. (It still does, and those who have been inclined to bemoan the London magazine’s fate might reflect that there are worse ones. In recent years its ...”

“... about the omnivore William Buckland, who found mole more disagreeable to eat than bluebottle, and Arthur Munby, known no longer for his poetry but for his oddity of sexual taste. But the famous Furnivall predominates, seen in ‘goatish contentment’ with waitresses, in political activity, in literary quarrels, half-making, half-marring the project. James ...”

“... were given titbits to eat by their Irish tenants, who felt sorry for them. Like children in an Arthur Ransome or C.S. Lewis novel, they rambled unnoticed around the great house and were given to taking off on their bicycles up the main road to the nearby town. It is well known in the world of fairytale and post-Freudian analysis that it is not a good thing ...”

“... inspired by allusions in Sappho’s poetry to an Adonis-like myth about the ageing Aphrodite and a young sun deity called Phaon (perhaps identifiable with Phaethon). The legend was widely known in post-classical times through an Ovidian or pseudo-Ovidian epistle, ‘Sappho to Phaon’, and assumed a central position in almost all later responses to the ...”

“... from Graham McCann’s book about Dad’s Army have been widely quoted, notably the insistence by Arthur Lowe (Mainwaring) on having a clause in his contract stipulating that in no scene would he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a ...”

“... his cousin Charles Darwin, frequented the slave markets of Constantinople; he noted how delighted young African women seemed to be at the prospect of their impending enslavement. ‘They seemed as merry as possible at the prospect of being sold,’ he enthuses, ‘and of soon finding, each of them, a master and a home.’ He also ranked women he passed in the ...”

“... the keepers takes place only at the end of the book, and when Mr Ramsay springs ‘lightly like a young man’ out of the boat and onto the rock, he disappears from the narrative.As an enigmatic symbol, the lighthouse has long held an imaginative appeal. The Pharos at Alexandria was remarkable among secular buildings, E.M. Forster wrote, in having ‘taken on ...”

“... on the street outside. This makes it the ideal target for the heist. Freddie is the wheelman, Arthur ‘the Jackie Robinson of safe-cracking’. Miami Joe, an angry Southerner with an inferiority complex, is the purple-suited mastermind whose motive is ‘monetary gain, and to bring Black Harlem down a notch’. Pepper turns up last in a Wes ...”

“... In an article on Arthur Koestler written in 1944, George Orwell suggested that the lack of imaginative depth in English political fictions, when these are compared with works of European origin, may be due to the fact that the English simply lack any experience of the totalitarian state: ‘The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of, but it has made very little emotional impact ...”

“... was the Irish famine. In Sydney he grew up speaking the language of the oppressor. But as a young Catholic with a failure for a father he had one conspicuous advantage among his handicaps. He was educated by the Jesuits of Riverview, who even in my time were still making sure that their pupils got plenty of learning rammed into their heads along with ...”

“... Cupertino and Mountain View, who have begun (it is rumoured) to flutter Democratically about her. Young-Titan Tesla guys with entrepreneurial dream-teeth and a no doubt healthy obsession with other men.(They’re good boys at heart: their artisanal leather wallets are made from 100 per cent organic Niman Ranch grain-fed beef.) The rail-thin wives should be ...”