“... lacked a crucial tattoo on his arm. He was probably in fact a butcher’s son from Wapping called Arthur Orton, who had ended up in Wagga Wagga, had seen the advertisements seeking the Tichborne heir, and had taken advantage of a mother’s grief. The story ‘had everything: toffs, Catholics, money, sex, mistaken identity, an inheritance, High Court ...”

“... Yes I’d eat you!                     In a nice little, white little, soft little, tender little, Juicy little, right ...”

“... killed me!’ Barbara Comyns’s daughter, Caroline, recognised her younger self in Fanny, the little girl who dies of scarlet fever in Comyns’s second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. ‘Poor, beautiful little Fanny! her life had been wasted because of stupidity and poverty.’ On its first publication in ...”

“... seldom) thoughts on life. I stopped around 1990, by which time I’d accumulated 30 or so of these little hardbacked books with marbled covers. Today, barren of inspiration or any inclination to do anything better, I start to transcribe and even index them. In the process I’m reminded of one of the reasons I stopped, which was that so ...”

“... he criticises. Immediately after reproaching cultural leftists for not accepting Sidney Hook and Arthur Schlesinger as heroes of the American Left, for instance, he reminds us that one of them boasted of voting for Nixon and the other lied through his teeth about the Bay of Pigs. He urges fellow Americans to be patriotic, despite the obvious murderousness of ...”

“... slogan was ‘not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’. Their general secretary, Arthur Cook, was described by Beatrice Webb as ‘a quivering mass of emotions, a mediumistic magnetic sort of creature’ who embodied ‘the burning expression’ of the miners’ ‘anger at the iniquities they were suffering’. He would not agree to ...”

“... whites protesting against court-mandated school desegregation. In 1974, a federal judge, W. Arthur Garrity Jr, had ordered the Boston school district to remedy its racial imbalance by sending students, usually by bus, to schools outside their racially homogeneous neighbourhoods. Boston’s whites – mostly Irish Catholic and fiercely turf-conscious ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of their brother as a very modern man, in favour of science, not God. They are impressed and a little wary. He became rather disillusioned with science in later life and a bit less dogmatic. I wonder what Clara Collet would have made of the youthful Gissing’s lectures to his brother: ‘A girl’s education should be of a very general & liberal ...”

“... Genghis, ‘a father concerned for the well-being of his family’ (Ratchnevsky) was surely as little above ‘political considerations’ (Ratchnevsky again) as any European contemporary concerned with dynastic stability. Given the tenor of its predecessors, then, one cannot blame Ratchnevsky’s biography for bringing forward such qualities as simplicity ...”

“... of Brown to focus his magnum opus on a baby’s face. The model for the child was his own son, Arthur, born in 1856. Work became in part an elaborate memorial for the boy, who died before he was a year old. Brown, at a low point in his uncertain fortunes, had to borrow money to pay for his funeral. Throughout his long and laborious life, Brown remained a ...”

“... have existed if independence had not made possible an intermediate stage of industrial protection. Arthur Griffith, the apostle of Irish separatism in the first two decades of the century and the first leader of an independent Irish government, was surely right to have made a period of industrial protection a crucial plank of his nationalist platform. The ...”

“... anonymity’ and without ‘local allegiance’. They also acted, however, with little challenge from Hautefaye’s inhabitants. A priest, a pit sawyer and one or two tenant farmers showed courage as they tried to extricate the victim, but the complicit silence of other neighbours sealed Monéys’s fate. Mentioned only in passing by ...”

“... a Cabinet Minister. Su T’ung-p’o wrote this in the first century AD (the translation is by Arthur Waley). There is indeed nothing new under the sun. Space on mountains, however, is limited, and, for ordinary Chinese people, there have been other ways of surviving the harsh and inevitable conflicts of life: feng shui remains one of them. The feng shui ...”

“... signa efficientia.’ This, urges Professor Kelly, is absurd. Daily life demands from language little sublimity but a near-infinity of routine. Translation, seen as a whole, must reflect this distribution. But all too often ‘the literary theorist is not concerned with the ordinary uses of language; and the hermeneutic theorist has misinterpreted the ...”