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“... On 5 December 1963, the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, a man in Boston named Arthur Inman, having made several earlier attempts on his own life, managed to put a bullet through his head. A variety of chronic ailments and complaints had made him an invalid for nearly all of his 68 years, and except for brief excursions in his ancient chauffeur-driven Cadillac, he had since 1919 confined himself to an apartment building in downtown Boston named Garrison Hall ...”

“... Arthur Rimbaud, the boy who gave it all up for something different, is a legend, both as a poet and a renouncer of poetry. He had finished with literature before the age of 21. By the time his work began to appear in the 1880s, to great acclaim, he had become a trader and a minor explorer in inhospitable country, working for a French company in Aden which sent him across the Red Sea to run a branch of the business – coffee, hides and ivory for the most part – in the town of Harar, between the Ogaden and the highlands of Abyssinia ...”

“... from Dou ‘with admiration on the lips but indifference in the heart’.This is the story told by Arthur Wheelock in his essay on Dou’s reputation in the catalogue of the exhibition of his work which can be seen at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 19 November. Wheelock goes on to describe the reassessment of Dou which took place in the later decades of the ...”

“... Arthur Koestler was a journalist with pretensions to grandeur. Certain of his works justified these pretensions – for example, his masterpiece, the novel Darkness at Noon, and the two autobiographical volumes, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing – though not so triumphantly as he would have wished them to do or as, in his more confident moments, he believed they had ...”

“... by students on first acquaintance, partly through a priggishness which will allow only the young to talk dirty. But he comes into his own in the graduate school and the Zapp-it-to-me international seminars, where priggishness takes more unnatural and exclusive forms. Yet little of this helps the poor biographer. S/he can lay out all the ‘bobs and ...”

“... Pursuing the truth about the McCarthyite witch-hunt via 17th-century Salem, Arthur Miller was one day transfixed by an etching in a library. It had been made by an eyewitness of the original trials, and showed a bearded judge with arms upraised in horror as he watched a covey of girls screaming and clawing at invisible tormentors ...”

“... of Edward IV in the male line. The king was poised to celebrate the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon. The splendid pageants and tournaments that accompanied the match made much of the king’s achievements. They stressed the ‘rich mount’ of his prosperity, playing on the name of his father’s earldom ...”

“... violence – brought into every home by television – on the picket-lines, where hordes of tough young miners and uniformed policemen sway and grapple in physical combat like Medieval armies. There is the uneasiness about the accountability of the Police. There are the guerrilla raids at night, presumably by striking miners, which leave a trail of damage and ...”

“... classic agrarian memoir by A.G. Street, was published in 1932. The traditional mixed farm where Arthur Street spent his boyhood in the first decade of the 20th century was the centre of a self-sufficient community, stout in defence of the four-course rotation and despising anything shop-bought. There was a ‘spaciousness and an aura of solid ...”

“... Australia’s first Government House, built for Captain Arthur Phillip when he arrived with the first fleet of convicts and settlers in 1788, was demolished in 1846 to make way for the grander Neoclassical architecture that befitted a burgeoning colony. Today the site is the forecourt of the new Museum of Sydney, with the ghostly floor-plan of the original residence picked out in white on the granite flagstones ...”

“... a proper respect for Herschel’s scientific eminence. But the most indignant response came from a young journalist at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia. This was Edgar Allan Poe, who had just weeks earlier published a short story, ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’, about an accidental voyage to the Moon in a hot air ...”

“... He liked the working class both in practice and in theory, by night and by day. Just as he pursued young men with energy and abandon, so too he wrote copious articles for journals and gave many lectures promoting radical causes. For Carpenter and men like him, including Forster, fellows of their own class were stiff and filled with phobias. Carpenter and his ...”

“... have shown, is nothing if not ambitious. In Man Walks into a Room (2002), she told the story of a young Columbia professor, Samson Greene, who, as the novel begins, is found roaming the Nevada desert; following a brain tumour, he has forgotten everything he has experienced since the age of 12. An amnesiac blank slate would be a paralysing challenge for a less ...”

“... of the commanders on the Western Front. Over naval affairs the exchanges of heavy fire between Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill reduced all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the ...”

“... and multilingual population, Mołodeczno (its Polish name). More ironies here, as, when the young Bauman entered the local gymnasium, he became such an exemplar of Polishness – ‘no one around spoke Polish as pure and refined as mine’ – that the deputy headmaster, a Belarusian nationalist, took against him. But no matter: Bauman quickly taught ...”