“... made no more sense than it makes for 20th-century New Yorkers to hanker after being ruled by King Arthur and his knights. Stone’s history is a good deal like Mark Twain’s, and hardly the worse for it either. Still, historical, textual, and interpretative questions will creep in. Did Socrates hanker after a return to aristocratic or monarchical ...”

“... home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine Baskett which I bought her in Holland and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it. Within all the afternoon, setting up shelfes in my study. At night to bed.’ And there it was, a day in the life of a young man on the ...”

“... generalisations are underscored by a number of errors. Westerns attributes Martin Ritt’s Hud to Arthur Penn and the well-publicised love of ‘Home on the Range’ to Theodore Roosevelt rather than Franklin; it imagines that cameras possessed zoom lenses in 1939 and that the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s defiance before Congress consisted in ...”

“... stood in the way of an American version.) According to Suchoff, Finkielkraut is no Allan Bloom or Arthur Schlesinger: ‘far from a neoconservative’, he is, rather, a pluralist in the vein of Henry Louis Gates, and his reflections on the differences between the terms ‘Israelite’ and ‘Jew’ find an echo in the American opposition between ...”

“... fringes of politics an unelected dilettante makes a President; his wife destroys his successor. Arthur Schlesinger has described Philip Graham as one of the more brilliant and tragic figures of his generation, a man of extraordinary vitality, audacity and charm, who was fascinated by power and men who possessed it. Graham was close to Lyndon Johnson, was ...”

“... that extended across Europe into Russia. When she died her great-grandson Albert Frederick Arthur George was five and not in the direct line of succession. Finding himself at the age of 41 seated on Edward I’s coronation chair in Westminster Abbey amid ‘the red, the gold, the gilt, the grandeur’, he was full of nerves and foreboding. ‘This is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Injuries of Class (co-written with Jonathan Cobb, 1972) is as classically, tragically American as Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, only to my mind far richer. Sennett has portrayed other figures who are just as touching and historically illuminating: Rico, the successful, hollowed-out consultant in The Corrosion of Character (1998); Rose in Together, who hated ...”

“... was set up in the mid-1950s, its co-directors were a Conservative, Ralph Harris, and a Liberal, Arthur Seldon, who preached their gospel to both parties, indeed to anybody who would listen. The Orange Book liberalism of Clegg and Laws, which came as such a surprise to so many Liberal Democrat voters, but not until after they had cast their ballots at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”