“... this month, offers the full span of Tynan’s correspondence, from his first precocious fanmail to Arthur Askey to a final letter of humorous verse to his son Matthew. But it is Tynan’s school and university days that represent the golden age of his letter-writing career. The letters written during this period, particularly those to his friend Julian ...”

“... Europe and America. One of the few geologists convinced by the evidence for continental drift was Arthur Holmes at the University of Durham. In 1927, he suggested that the radioactive elements heating the Earth’s interior could provide the power to move continents. The hot rocks would rise, then fall when they reached the cooler upper layers, creating a ...”

“... Not long after going down from Oxford he went to Palestine to serve as an aide-de-camp to Sir Arthur Wauchope, High Commissioner of the mandated area. He was appalled to find Jews and Arabs at each others’ throats, a situation which he felt the policies of the Administration in which he served exacerbated. The only organisation he could find in which ...”

“... which was part of his personality … “I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see gold-plated urinals,” he would tell me. “Hey, Lenin wrote that we would have them some day, and I sincerely hope so!”’Julius’s work inspecting electrical equipment for defence contractors gave him access to secret information about new ...”

“... helmets as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the ...”

“... been amply attested on the king’s birthday in 1734, when he wore a suit so heavily laced with gold that, as the Earl of Chesterfield said, ‘he was taken by many at a distance for a gilt garland.’ George Brummell, an equally famous beau of a later day, would have thought that irredeemably vulgar. Yet Bath, a city in the ascendant, needed someone like ...”

“... One might say that his was either the maddest form of sanity or the sanest form of madness. Arthur Miller called him ‘the mad inventor of modern theatre’, in a useful oversimplification. Carl Larsson’s portrait of Strindberg, on the book jacket, essentially in sepia but with rosy lips and penetratingly blue eyes (‘the most beautiful sapphire ...”

“... are determined to read the historical sources sideways. They read romances and ask why King Arthur had to be bled in public. They read sermons on lust and ask what these imply about dormitory arrangements. The drive of their collective work is to inquire whether the Medieval psyche was at all like the modern one, or was inevitably altered by lower ...”

“... Fertile soil was not easily found, crops failed, rations had to be reduced again and again. Arthur Phillip, naval captain turned governor, saved the settlement from collapse by ‘grit, example, and stubborn evenhandedness in the face of hopeless prisoners and near-mutinous marines’. It sounds like as heroic a feat as any ever performed in the ...”

“... in the auditorium. Until 1957, Matthews had been a favourite son at the newspaper: the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, even authorised a loan of $16,000 so he could buy a house in London. In Gay Talese’s book about the Times, The Kingdom and the Power, we see Matthews in 1967 sitting ‘rather forlornly in Room 1048 along a corridor of editorial writers ...”

“... in the leafy suburbs, as well as the wide crescents and avenues in town, were coloured red or gold. Since many streets had a mix of classes, there was much crosshatching and playing with colour. Some streets were black at one end and pink at the other; blue and pink – ‘poverty and comfort mixed’ – were fused to produce a purply brown; a blue ...”

“... to be possess’d with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before, To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smoothe the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. The last line could be a comment on the ...”

“... It is all as fascinating and remote as a traveller’s tale, and as hygienically distanced as Arthur Morrison’s Child of the Jago or the ‘Monster Doss House’ photographed for the first edition of Jack London’s People of the Abyss in 1903. But the news is that the Doss House is still there in Fieldgate Street, looking ripe to fall to the front-line ...”

“... wife watches him as she does her crochet. ‘The tiny flash of her steel hook and the hair-thin gold in his ear signalled in candlelight.’ Eventually, acting entirely on her own, the wife betrays him, one of her own people, to the police. The woman who keeps the shebeen spits in her face. The story leaves behind a faint doubt about the author’s ...”

“... moment in the text. Like a medieval tomb, the judge’s crypt is embellished with ‘bright gold’ letters as inviolate as his body itself. Yet their language is dead beyond recall. Not a single cleric can decipher these ‘runish’ characters – an adjective that evokes the half-magical, pre-Roman script of England. The discovery of the corpse ...”