“... of tiresome people from the Daily Express. (Wodehouse’s relationship with the Waughs – Alec, Arthur and Evelyn – must be somebody’s thesis.) ‘Over Seventy’ was first published in 1957 when Wodehouse was 76. It is not as funny as the first book in the trilogy, ‘Bring on the girls’ (1954). This is a fanciful memoir about his life as a Broadway ...”

“... with after-death experience? (I’m thinking of things like Mrs Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City, Arthur Machen’s tales, Aldous Huxley’s Time must have a stop, and a host of horror and SF.) But the main objection to Death Sentences is its self-consciously high-powered theoretical argument. The book was evidently written in the exuberance of the author’s ...”

“... intervention. He made a mortal enemy of the rival claimant, Menelik, the ambitious and clever young ruler of the southern kingdom of Shoa. Menelik’s power was significantly enhanced by his marriage in 1883 to Taytu Betul, which gave him the support of her influential kinsmen in the north. The acquisition in 1887 of the city of Harar, situated 300 miles ...”

“... my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture Library, Biggles, Arthur Ransome, bird books. In the 1950s I used to order Puffin books by post from the catalogue, the pleasure of unwrapping the parcel rivalling the discovery of a new book in a Christmas stocking. For my ninth or tenth birthday I asked for a glass-fronted ...”

“... of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which some barristers are prone, it is almost unknown for them to become notorious for their bacchanalian lifestyles. So why is it that George ...”

“... Fyfes and of her own childhood. Lehmann was good on children, especially the anxieties of the very young. She was good, too, on the mixed moods of life, less commonly found in fiction: the nostalgia of adolescence in Dusty Answer, or, much later in The Echoing Grove, the interplay of habit and passion when a married couple fall asleep in the middle of a ...”

“... and Irving Kristol, émigré Russians such as Nicolas Nabokov, and former Cominternists such as Arthur Koestler – had their formative cultural and political experiences back in the 1930s or even earlier, and jumped ship either after the purges or with the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Given that the US was a latecomer to the European culture wars, it may ...”

“... that paid off handsomely, though Greene ended up with little profit when he was squeezed out by Arthur Miller. It was a time of crisis for Marilyn, when her marriage to Joe DiMaggio was breaking up and her affair with Miller beginning. In 1956 she converted to Judaism, married Miller, and went to England to make a film she financed herself: The Prince and ...”

“... since its authors were the financier Henry Drummond Wolff, whose antisemitism was well known, and Arthur Bryant.A successful author of patriotic potboilers, Bryant had been caught out by the war, which began within a few months of the publication of his book Unfinished Victory. This described how ‘the native Germans … were now confronted with a problem ...”

“... such an idle reprobate would provoke Johnson’s censure. But the lightly sketched portrait of young Minim appears in a journal whose title commits it to defending a life of easy wins, as long as that life cannot hurt anyone. The key lesson of Minim’s petty existence is that – however malicious his intentions – he remains innocent of damage. Johnson ...”

“... he offers up is fanciful, contrived. Like Marshall Walker’s dutiful assemblage of notecards (‘Arthur Miller studies the relation between society and the individual in terms of three clearly identifiable themes’), it assumes an orderly progression of influence, of decades and periods, of regional writers and schools and themes, of a ‘usable ...”

“... rearguard battle against both these revisionist schools for years. A vivid recent example is Arthur Schlesinger’s The Cycles of American History, an important and provocative new collection of essays that displays their author’s famous eloquence and erudition, and his equally famous liberal politics. Prominent among them are a lengthy defence of the ...”

“... for describing smells. Etymologists bear this out. In an article in Muttersprache (1984) Arthur Kutzelnigg calculates that since the Middle Ages the German lexicon of smell words has shrunk from 158 to 62, of which a large number survive only in dialect or the ‘little languages’ used in adult-child discourse (‘stinky-poo’ words). And those ...”

“... given in the opening chapter of the origins of Islam tells an exceedingly old-fashioned tale of young Muhammad the mystic giving way to an older Muhammad the social legislator – it made me think of Carlyle’s account in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Where the non-specialist reader is concerned, one of the most confusing aspects is ...”

“... page the book’s centrepiece in fact includes a fourth essay, ‘George Eliot: She Was Still Young’. But this was given alone in both a broadcast and a journal version, in 1980, while the others (prefaced by ‘Literature and the Matter of Fact’) were linked as a series for the Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1991. The three together make a discrete ...”