“... closed off by her security men. I see a couple of proprietorial Russians trying to ferry Arthur Miller to the graveside. Squeezing past, he steps apologetically on our toes in one direction and then again in the other direction – but gets no nearer the epicentre represented by Yevtushenko and the television cameras. Yevtushenko introduces each ...”

“... A working-class Catholic born in Liverpool in 1954, who became a driven and brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a one-room flat in the East End, born in 1944, who trained as an accountant and then made a ...”

“... on national security affairs that I know’. What was going on? When Kissinger told his friend Arthur Schlesinger that he found Quayle to be ‘well-informed and intelligent’, Schlesinger took it to mean ‘that Quayle listens reverently to Henry and that Henry thinks Quayle may be president someday’. When that dream died, he moved on to George ...”

“... at Sobibor on 9 July 1943. Gunther fell between the stools of eligibility for reparations: too young for a profession, he couldn’t get reparations for his career being interrupted; being between high school and university when the war began, he couldn’t argue that his studies had been interrupted.My grandmother never quite believed that her daughter ...”

“... ambitious and glamorous musical numbers. These were produced by the so-called Freed Unit, led by Arthur Freed and staffed by brilliant choreographers, composers, dancers and musicians, many of them gay men (studio insiders referred to the unit as ‘Freed’s Fairies’). The most important person in the unit as far as Garland was concerned was Edens, who ...”

“... might help prop him up in his doddering years.‘Philip had searched diligently for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I ...”

“... campaign to vilify Casement, there was a public commission demanding a reprieve, spearheaded by Arthur Conan Doyle. The signatories included Arnold Bennett, G.K. Chesterton, J.G. Frazer, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, John Masefield and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. George Bernard Shaw also petitioned for a pardon – in fact, it would be hard to imagine ...”

“... to all culture’ – just what Wilson now set about doing.He wrote Jitney in ten days, sitting at Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, and sent it to the National Playwrights Conference. The conference, held every year in Waterford, Connecticut, had been established to help young dramatists work on flawed but promising ...”

“... pink and exhausted and a bit frightened of the ladies.The tour, led by a somewhat zombie-like young Native American woman, turns out to be perfunctory. She recites a canned history of the place in somnambulist fashion; shows us the Indian cemetery and explains that everyone in it is buried upright. We see adobe huts under repair and hear about the bricks ...”

“... a big middle-aged man in a raincoat, who said he was a detective sergeant, and a sensitive-looking young constable in uniform, who didn’t say anything at all. ‘You’ve taken your time,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Yes,’ said the sergeant. ‘We would have been earlier but there was a slight ... ah, glitch as they say. Rang the wrong doorbell. The fault of ...”

“... his friend the painter John Opie about the law on bigamy and perjury. Opie wished to marry the young Norwich radical writer Amelia Alderson, but he was already married to a woman who had since run off with an Irish army officer, as so many young wives did in those days. Opie wanted to prove that his marriage had not been ...”

“... to provide centres of collective life’, shaping the sensibilities of bored dreamers such as the young Tynan. Much like the giant Birminghams of the settler colonies, the city came to suffer from an intense ‘cultural cringe’. The semi-proletarian novelists of the Birmingham Group, including Walter Allen, Walter Brierley, Leslie Halward and John ...”

“... Bohemian courts for restoration of these appropriated estates. Among those who helped them was the young Prague lawyer, John Leo, who became Elizabeth’s husband. Kelley was transported to the far north of Bohemia, to Hnevin Castle overlooking the town of Most (or in German, Brüx). The chief archival record of his imprisonment is, once again, an unpaid ...”

“... of British intellectuals who have thought themselves above expressing national pride. A young academic (in his mid-thirties), he belongs to a generation which has become alert to the political importance of patriotism and which takes Britain’s European future pretty much for granted. His enjoyable tour through the past sixty years stops at the ...”

“... at the Germans in a farm building, 2000 metres northward. Genially he needled his observer, a young captain called Peter, who needed a haircut and smoked a pipe as he studied the Germans through field glasses, and called signals.‘Drop three-oh minutes and add one hundred,’ said Peter without taking his pipe from his mouth. ‘Drop three-oh minutes and ...”