“... 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 ...”

“... The people who stopped put both hands on the Ferragamo window and the white light made each one a little blonder. One woman said ‘beautiful’; the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the altar, where a glass case stood ...”

“... by reticence. There was nothing unusual in such circumstances. A child of them was bound to know little of his father. In our family, however, a further shutter fell across his memory. He had spent his life thousands of miles away from Ireland, where he died and we grew up, in a China that ceased to exist as soon as he was gone. We knew he had worked there ...”

“... temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s correspondence with this little cabal breathes with that abject eagerness that was so much a part of the one-time Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. To Alsop he wrote, on 20 April 1966, an account of a dinner with McGeorge Bundy:I have never admired anyone so much, so ...”

“... foundation of the storied ‘Reagan revolution’?Contemporary historians like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are either apologists ...”

“... a good deal of his life among English-speaking people. He is one of those German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely ...”

“... in the dramatic forms supplied by Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Fugard found what he needed in Camus’s treatment of Algeria: ‘when I first encountered the articulation of that almost pagan, sensual life lived out in the sun, next to a sea, with warm rocks being, in a sense, the ultimate reality, it struck a ...”

“... adventures that originally belonged to a separate branch of chivalric literature, the tales of Arthur and his Round Table. In the late 15th century this familiar material was handled with sophisticated wit by Luigi Pulci in Medici Florence and Matteo Maria Boiardo in Este Ferrara. Boiardo left his poem Orlando Innamorato unfinished at his death in ...”

“... that it has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to ...”