“... due course, Edward himself was to become the first Saxon saint to be formally canonised at Rome. Little remains of Edward’s building, however, for in the 1240s the Plantagenet king Henry III set himself to reconstruct the Abbey in honour of the royal saint. Henry was a sincere devotee of Edward, and the reality of his piety cannot be doubted, manifesting ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Tale of the Heike, newly translated by Royall Tyler. Tyler is the most prominent translator since Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker to take on the Sisyphean task of rendering Japan’s vast classical literature into accessible English. The Tale of the Heike is an especially challenging work for Western audiences. The Tale of Genji, with its eerily ...”

“... She suggests compellingly that his early interest in Sappho was connected to his relationship with Arthur Hallam, and that he discovered his own identity as a poet partly through his rewritings of Sappho. The chapter is flawed only by the suggestion that Tennyson’s response to the ‘body’ of Sappho’s text must be seen as murder or rape, although any ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and is riled to this day that the fine players he warmed to there many years ago, the six-hitting Arthur Wellard and the beefy opener, Harold Gimblett – who impressed me no end once by returning the ball full toss to the wicket-keeper from the boundary underarm: his forearms looked to measure as many inches around as my teenage thighs – never got to play ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after it was announced that the pit was to be closed along with nineteen others across Britain. Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM, decided to use the union’s rule 41 to call strikes on an area by area basis rather than holding a national ballot. Union leaders in Nottinghamshire and other smaller coalfields such as Leicestershire raised ...”

“... how long he can preserve this state of innocence. To explore this question we need to go a little into the mental space of diaries at large. But let it be admitted first that whatever else a journal may or may not be good for, it is a good subject for the attentions of an editor. By definition attuned to the private and familiar (and to perceiving them ...”

“... nor gout, have no fear of corns or that another man should kick my shins … To be sure, I am a little awkward at running but then, to make amends, I’ll hop with any man in town’ – is at once absurd and defiantly courageous. For roughly three decades in the mid-18th century Foote was England’s pre-eminent stage comic, the toast of the clubs and ...”