“... socialist romantic William Morris, implying – mistakenly – that the unideological Attlee had little idea about Morris or his idyll of agrarian Englishness. Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) – also a utopian fiction – was written as a riposte to Bellamy’s Looking Backward. The pragmatic Attlee knew which vision seemed more ...”

“... of 1934.’ There are ‘gats’ and ‘rods’; Anna (aka ‘toots’) has seen Public Enemy, Little Caesar, Scarface and Citizen Kane; The Glass Key is in cinemas; there’s talk of Gary Cooper, Veronica Lake, Joan Fontaine. There are egg creams, charlottes russes and clams casino. Agnes and Eddie’s sister Brianne once danced in the Follies, and Agnes ...”

“... of British history set up by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century. Was there really no King Arthur, and no King Lear either? Milton clearly did not want to believe it, arguing patriotically if defensively: ‘those old and inborn names of successive Kings, never any to have bin real persons, or done in thir lives at least some part of what so long hath ...”

“... in his prime and the myth was developed and embellished in the books of former lieutenants like Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen. It has only really been in the past decade that the revisionists have gained the upper hand and Kennedy’s record has been compared unfavourably with those of his two predecessors, Truman and Eisenhower. Even his two ...”

“... to have an abiding affection. The Standard then was no mere rag: Foot was to recruit Jon Kimche, Arthur Koestler and Isaac Deutscher to write for it, and it provided Foot with a secure and happy base. Over the years Beaverbrook showered him with gifts, right-wing opinions, money, and a friendship which, given their opposed views, did both men credit. But ...”

“... the differences in attitude and status between share fishermen and those working for wages, but little about the daily struggle with the sea. The narrow focus leads these writers to omit consideration of the major villainy in the history of the activity: the systematic over-fishing of our waters by more and more powerful harvesting techniques. There was ...”

“... The great heroes of chivalric mythology were revealed through their swords; Roland had Durendaal, Arthur had Excalibur, and in the heat of a duel Lancelot recognised a fellow knight of the Round Table by his sword. When Perceval was dubbed knight, he kissed his weapon. Sword responded to sword; swords were symbols. When Edward I’s judges asked Earl Warenne ...”

“... that is, the police – are fended off with no trouble at all.) The way in which the honest little shopkeeper gets caught up in the Hung triad’s web and is eventually killed (has his ‘face washed’) is not the most original feature of Mo’s novel. What is fresh and consistently comic is the quaint way in which familiar British situations are ...”

“... easily’ Britain’s greatest commander of the war. It is a pity that Sir David has not allowed a little more space to discuss disputes among the Chiefs of Staff, in particular to expand his passing reference to Brooke’s reservations about strategic bombing and the excessive influence over Churchill enjoyed by ‘Bomber’ Harris. Brooke’s love-hate ...”

“... churchyards. Books of popular homiletics such as George Gifford’s Country Divinity (1581), Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) and Lewis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety (1611) aimed to set forth the rudiments of soul-saving doctrine in plain English. Their authors were Puritan ministers, who drew on their own experience in ...”

“... about successful or extraordinary younger sons: about the Duke of Wellington, for instance, who as Arthur Wellesley – the third surviving son of an Anglo-Irish earl – took an ensign commission in the army because it wasn’t clear what else he’d be good at (he was ‘food for powder and nothing more’, his mother said). Rory Muir’s interest is in the ...”

“... pentathlete Mary Peters; from subsidiary groupings such as Actors for Europe, which included Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers, and Writers for Europe, whose membership ranged from Agatha Christie to Tom Stoppard. Ogres such as Benn, Paisley and Powell were no match for these recruits. The 1975 referendum has attracted the attention of various political ...”

“... Kristol. It attracted a host of leftish public intellectual luminaries as contributors, including Arthur Koestler, who in 1950 inaugurated the CCF at its opening congress in Berlin with a ‘Manifesto for Freedom’. Koestler, along with Spender and other ex-communists, also contributed to The God That Failed, a 1949 book edited by the Labour MP Richard ...”

“... the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lord Rayleigh. Eleanor’s brother was the future prime minister Arthur Balfour. Sidgwick knew a great deal about the inner workings of English politics as the various Irish and imperial crises unfolded throughout the last third of the 19th century; the unease those crises provoked permeated his economics and politics, and he ...”

“... Industrial Revolution. Roe gets this crucial matter right, and the following thoughts are sharp little forays at the edge of his achievement. He tends to misjudge his readership. He thinks we need telling that libertas is ‘from the Latin word for freedom’, but on the same page introduces the poet Bryan Waller Proctor without adding that he wrote under ...”