“... with what was now being termed an ‘imperial presidency’ (the title of an influential book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, published in 1973, which argued that with superpower status the American executive was exceeding its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together ...”

“... by mass popular culture. No longer merely a passive lump in an armchair from 7 to 11 p.m., like Arthur Seaton’s father in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Grace finds that the boundary between her own thoughts and corporate thoughts has become unstable. But Smith’s take on the relationship between people and TV is much odder than that. The television ...”

“... ones/draped ones/costumed ones.’ ‘To a Gentleman Friend’ begins: ‘You fooled me you little floating worm.’ An apostrophe to men describes the feminine burden, but it can also be read as an artist’s statement:You are the steady rainThe looked-forsThe must-bes …We turn rainInto diamond fringesBlack cloudsInto pink tulle.Bloemink draws ...”

“... Dramatists, contains a passage germane here: ‘A play of Shakespeare’s and a play of Henry Arthur Jones’s are essentially of the same type, the difference being that Shakespeare is very much greater and Mr Jones very much more skilful.’ This explains a lot when Updike criticises Degas’s ‘unevenness of rendering’: the woman’s dress in Woman ...”

“... thirteenth. Unlucky for some, but we’ll see how it turns out. He received the pint and drank a little more slowly, but half-way through it the temptation to be sick became a necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought it off and struggled to light a cigarette. Smoke caught in his windpipe and he had just time enough to push ...”

“... he went to direct the John Innes Horticultural Institution in 1910 (before the five years were up, Arthur Balfour’s benefaction had enabled the University to establish a permanent Professorship of Genetics, held by R.C. Punnett and then R.A. Fisher). MacKenzie is thus wrong in detail, but would in any case have been wrong to regard as necessarily ...”

“... foreign adviser, a Swiss engineer named Alfred Ilg). Americans, Russians, Italians and even Arthur Rimbaud, the poet turned arms dealer, came to do business with the king of Shoa. There had been Italians in Ethiopia from much earlier, mainly missionaries like Father (later Cardinal) Guglielmo Massaia, who had been an adviser to Tewodros, Yohannes and ...”

“... seen the horrors of the evictions after the Famine. When he became an MP, he was dismayed by how little interest his fellow MPs took in the sufferings and struggles of the Indian people. He was soon known as ‘the Member for India’. But his compassion didn’t temper his critique of Christianity. In the first issue of his first periodical, the short-lived ...”

“... written for defendants in the courts. Several of these, including the once celebrated but now little read ‘On the Crown’, deal directly with Demosthenes’ own political career, while surviving speeches by other, rival politicians – one recently recovered from a palimpsest thanks to digital imaging techniques – analyse his career from an ...”

“... his separation from his wife. In August a letter Dickens had written to his friend and manager Arthur Smith, with permission to show it to anyone he chose, appeared in the New York Daily Tribune, making reference to the ‘mental disorder’ under which Catherine Dickens sometimes laboured. Not surprisingly, the legacies of 1858 included Wilkie Collins’s ...”

“... at the age of 14 to a London exhibition of Greek and Minoan artefacts and happened to hear Sir Arthur Evans no less, the excavator of Knossos, explain that no one had yet been able to understand the signs cut into the clay tablets that he had begun to find there at the turn of the century. Fifteen years later, Ventris knew how they must be read, having ...”

“... depending on who they are speaking to – from mockney when talking to clients in the cell to Little Lord Fauntleroy’s posher cousin when addressing the judge. We learn also about Carman’s pressurised working arrangements: how he would return from a heavy drinking session to begin preparing for an important cross-examination, or even call in at his ...”

“... Air Force, and despite the help the Red Army could provide by driving simultaneously south to Port Arthur, the casualties on the beaches of Kyushu and Honshu alone were expected to be staggering: advance estimates numbered tens of thousands dead on the first day. Pushing on from those bridgeheads in the bitterly cold weather, the Allied Armies would come face ...”

“... principle: ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse, and it is therefore in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ But blind reaction wouldn’t have sustained the Tories indefinitely. During his meteorically brief political career in the 1880s, Lord Randolph Churchill, following Disraeli’s lead, organised the Conservative Party as a ...”

“... for describing smells. Etymologists bear this out. In an article in Muttersprache (1984) Arthur Kutzelnigg calculates that since the Middle Ages the German lexicon of smell words has shrunk from 158 to 62, of which a large number survive only in dialect or the ‘little languages’ used in adult-child discourse ...”