“... he first appeared, in the novella A Study in Scarlet in 1887, no one took much notice. But when Arthur Conan Doyle repackaged Holmes and Watson in short stories for the Strand Magazine, the trifle improvised for pin money by a struggling young doctor soon turned into an apotheosis that bemused, enriched and finally ...”

“... All four at some point shared a bed with Lucian Freud; at least three of them slept with Arthur Koestler; and two of them married Derek Jackson, who had previously been married to Pamela Mitford and would eventually tot up six marriages.Before I go on, I want to mention a paradox that I’d like someone to explain to me. On the one hand, divorce in ...”

“... Heisenberg, Robert Wood, E.O. Lawrence, George Kistiakowsky, Leo Szilárd, the Compton brothers (Arthur and Karl) and Albert Einstein. One newspaper columnist observed Loomis’s odd form of philanthropy: ‘In Tuxedo Park, his home, he has built the Loomis Laboratories, and any scientist who wishes to devote a week to a year of study to pure science ...”

“... seems more elusive. Ellis has received critical and biographical attention before, notably in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s well-known study of 1959, and also in Vincent Brome’s Havelock Ellis: Philosopher of Love, published last year. But students of biography will particularly welcome Phyllis Grosskurth’s contribution, remembering her last biographical ...”

“... and Labour Parties in 1917. In particular, the plans of the Labour Party, as they matured under Arthur Henderson’s direction in the months following his departure from the Lloyd George Government, were premised upon this assumption. Thus we find Henderson assuring the Liberal editor C.P. Scott in December 1917 that ‘in the majority of cases he would ...”

“... into the same frame as Albert and Harold of Steptoe and Son, Oscar and Felix of The Odd Couple, or Arthur Wilson and George Mainwaring of Dad’s Army is to see that the comedy is the result of a relationship rather than the brittle patter of variety cross-talk. Influence in comedy, as in literature, takes some unexpected twists and, like the tradition ...”

“... as always-already his own from the outset. It is hard to know quite how Beowulf is the origin of Arthur Hugh Clough or Simon Armitage, but in any case Heaney has dug down with his pen to ‘the first stratum of the language’ and appropriated his birthright. As Harold Bloom might less decorously put it, the belated bastard offspring has now installed ...”

“... own ideologies of the splitting of good from evil – Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As quickly becomes clear, the solutions of splitting and multiplicity are by no means peculiar to the West: differences in slants and biases between cultures do not disguise the basic similarities of the narrative figures, and the anxieties ...”

“... to address the question of gender by drawing a comparison with Eugénie Sellers (a.k.a. Mrs Arthur Strong). Sellers plays a structural role in this book, her relative obscurity providing a contrast to Harrison’s posthumous fame. Initially, Sellers seems to have been less academically gifted than Harrison (she left Cambridge with a ‘third ...”

“... Halliwell fell in love with and married the baronet’s daughter. Thereafter Phillipps hated the young man implacably, and did all he could to damage him and his wife. Halliwell nevertheless went on with his work, much of which was of biographical importance. When Phillipps died in 1872, his son-in-law, to comply with the terms of the baronet’s ...”

“... aluminium business, a cornerstone of the Mellon fortune, was, Andrew later admitted, managed by Arthur Vining Davis: ‘You might say that he was practically the whole business.’ Gulf Oil was overseen by one of Andrew’s nephews. The banking businesses were controlled jointly by Andrew and Dick, but they were advised by a succession of highly talented ...”

“... thousand years ago, before the first farmers. Was it wall-to-wall forest with a few small gaps, as Arthur Tansley supposed in The British Islands and their Vegetation seventy years ago, or was it a savannah of slowly shifting groves and wide expanses of grass kept open by large herds of big grazing animals, as Vera’s book proposed, igniting an unquenched ...”

“... in the first episode will tend to both the pregnant Pauline and the comatose Reg, is married to a young nurse who is killed by an unexploded bomb in the garden of their newly bought home. Dr Legg, whose last appearance in the series was in 2019, never remarried. At the same time, a fierce optimism – talk of Beveridge and the welfare state – is rising from ...”

“... been radically different. But what about that street ballad from the Napoleonic wars in which a young woman laments the loss of her lover, pressganged to serve on the Victory, and in which social protest does not prevent her acclaiming ‘the noble lord, bold Nelson’? What about the popular success of Shakespeare’s history plays, or the fame of ‘the ...”

“... She was now ‘a sly, designing body’ who ‘looks all the people through most wickedly’, as Arthur Murphy put it. Hester Thrale thought that one unsophisticated family friend who had been reckoned a prospective husband for Fanny was ‘no Match for the Arts of a Novel-writer’. In her letter-journals, Burney is a more anxious character than the steely ...”