“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... torn between her relationship with Etienne Balsan, a wealthy French playboy and horse breeder, and Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, a wealthy English polo player and tycoon. This is exactly the period of her life Chanel liked to dwell on. Boy Capel, she later said, this ‘magnificent’ figure of a man, was the ‘great stroke of luck in my life; I had met a human ...”

“... who made a practice of stealing Children, to Eat them, they were all burned, by order of Sir Arthur Chichester, then Governour of the North of Ireland. He likewise tells us, that the poor Butchers, and other Trades-men, who could not afford to part with their goods, at such Rates as the Army would have them, were daily Dragooned by them. That the poor ...”

“... way of evidence, Adamski provided photos of the Venusian spaceship. Not everyone was convinced – Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that the pictures bore an ‘uncanny resemblance to electric light fittings with table-tennis balls fixed underneath’ – but thousands were, and Adamski became an international sensation. His book Flying Saucers Have Landed ...”

“... these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad business, this little kindness, but now and then it proved a wise investment of faith or pity. Mr Cerf, of Random House, was especially good in this way, and was known to give sets of office keys to his ‘special writers’, just so as they’d have somewhere to spread their ...”

“... accomplished Latinist still to compose and deliver the annual Crewian oration in Latin. A little reading in his favourite classical authors can almost seem part of his daily routine, in the way some people might now meditate or do exercises: returning home from dinner parties, he explained in 1862, he would finish his school reports, write a few ...”