“... legend as it was bequeathed by the Middle Ages. Robin already has his most familiar companions, Little John, Will Scarlett (or something similar), Much the Miller’s son and Friar Tuck. He is at home in Sherwood Forest and the sworn enemy of the Sheriff of Nottingham. He is an archer of genius and a master of disguise. He is loyal to the king, and ‘dyde ...”

“... of Disraeli’s father, a middle-class man of letters, when he read his son’s earlier novels; Arthur Waugh, not unlike Isaac D’Israeli, took a quizzical view of his son’s upper-class fantasies.) Brideshead Revisited (hence its appeal to the Americans) is not a picture of what the world is like: rather, a carefully painted canvas of what Waugh would ...”

“... biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now.’Hannay is sceptical about the ‘Jew-anarchists’ but notes that his neighbour’s tales of international financiers stirring up ...”

“... to their own devices’, doing the sorts of thing that would later be re-created by their friend Arthur Ransome in Swallows and Amazons. Collingwood remembered exploring the countryside on foot or by bike or in a little boat called Swallow, learning to recognise plants, rocks, wildlife and stars. He would also accompany ...”

“... Yes, I know.Mr Birbeck: I’ve brought a photographer. I hope you don’t mind? We thought a little study of you in your own home would be novel and interesting.Leo: (bitterly) I’m sure it would.Birbeck proceeds to ask Leo, a playwright who has just had another successful West End first night, what his other plays are called, what sports he follows and ...”

“... Yesterday night at fifteen minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life.’ He gave up ‘his little innocent breath like a bird’. It is easy to dismiss Emerson as a faded sage, whose vaporous hymns to nature or self-reliance seem less vital than the radical provocations of his friends Whitman and Thoreau ...”

“... that was virulently homophobic: America seemed unwilling to accept men who deviated more than a little from the box-shouldered heterosexual norm. Perhaps the events of the Sixties made society more receptive to human difference, though it’s hard to imagine many members of the ‘counter-culture’ subscribing, for example, to the gay shibboleth that ...”

“... themselves disprove the latter; the former, however, is a more complicated matter. Mr Burn blames Arthur Koestler and, even more, John Middleton Murry for putting about the suicide theory. Koestler had taken Hillary up after he had written The Last Enemy and Hillary greatly admired him (Mary was less enthusiastic about the author of Darkness at Noon: ‘Too ...”

“... well as the run-up to Mau Mau in Kenya) took place under another noted Fabian Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones. Ranger is at pains to insist that Zimbabwe’s road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism nor, as John Saul and Basil Davidson inferred in the late Seventies, an inferior version of Frelimo-style socialism in ...”

“... Olive made them working clothes and they used to come and ask for jobs and I used to give them little jobs and pay them.’ At the age of ten, Jim was already soliciting the votes of his fellow workmen on behalf of the Labour candidate for Westminster, and on his 17th birthday he popped round the corner to Smith Square and joined the Labour Party ...”

“... lived like a bourgeois long before he was widely known. Later in life he perhaps exploited it a little; the bowler hat, no longer in daily use, was within easy reach for journalists and photographers. Bored with the extravagant caperings of Dali, the press and public were intrigued by the contrast between the banal regularity of Magritte’s life and the ...”

“... imagery, its lack of all punctuation, exhibit a determination to be ‘absolument moderne’, as Arthur Rimbaud had thought all poets must be some forty years earlier. Beckett translated the poem’s visceral, if enigmatic, last line, ‘Soleil cou coupé’, as ‘Sun corseless head’. This perhaps underplays the violence which other translators have ...”

“... an unresolved Oepidus complex, with Wilson cast in the role of Christ and his father as God. Arthur Link, Wilson’s pre-eminent biographer, spoke for a majority of scholars in seeing him as essentially a Christian idealist, gripped by grand but unrealistic ideals, especially the League of Nations, whose rigid commitment to these ideals brought him ...”

“... in Nantes, with its grand merchants’ mansions and its opera house, the English traveller Arthur Young found himself in a strikingly different world from the one he had been journeying through: ‘Mon Dieu! I cried to myself, do all the wastes, the deserts, the heath, ling, furz, broom and bog that I have passed for three hundred miles lead to this ...”

“... of Kennedy’s sisters, and, by arrangement with his father, Robert Kennedy had worked for him. Arthur Schlesinger, who later worked in the Kennedy White House, said that Kennedy didn’t want to alienate Massachusetts Catholics, but Dallek calls his excuses ‘weak’, ‘selfish’ and ‘legalistic’ and describes his failure to vote as ‘an enduring ...”