“... 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 ...”

“... biographies since the 1990s, while The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966), edited by J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, were reissued in 1997 and supplemented with Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell in 2000. Gaskell’s image, too, was transformed: the married woman whose earnings were pocketed by her husband, the Rev. William Gaskell, gave way to a canny, adaptable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Kaplan, performed the ceremony.Fred entered journalism early, as a gofer for the legendary Arthur Brisbane of the Hearst papers. By his late twenties, when he was at Parade magazine, he’d become ‘Sparks’. Apart from no longer sounding Jewish, the name was almost onomatopoeic, perfectly suited to his charged personality. By 1946 he’d left Parade ...”

“... unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of somebody or something … a typical poor little American rich boy’. But on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit ...”

“... and founded a French-speaking conservatoire. Said’s closest friends at Princeton and Harvard, Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places ...”

“... and Kim Jong-un – but, however atypical Snowden was in other ways, this timing was crucial. A little older and he wouldn’t have encountered the internet until adulthood; a little younger and the internet he found would have been the corporate version we have now. His family got its first modem in 1992, when ...”

“... among these a few should nonetheless be works of distinction. Stoner, a book that received very little notice upon its appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work.’ Williams’s boss’s widow later told Charles Shields, who tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English ...”

“... when even undergraduates wrote as if they were middle-aged – to the magnificent ‘Wrying a Little’, on Cymbeline, Jacobean marriage law and female desire, are nourishing to the spirit. Livy, Machiavelli, Ford, Dekker, Heywood and Jonson all figure in the book, but the main recurring subject is Shakespeare. It is, moreover, good to see the publication ...”

“... vignettes of poverty, endless movement around the same small nexus of streets, the Village, Little Italy. He was ‘God’s spy’, a poet fink keeping secret notebooks. The early poems are about his mother and the sea, their correspondence: ‘The sea ate her / Upon the shore I found a strange / yet beautiful food.’ Or about gangsters, death ...”

“... their father’s permission was needed and he was reluctant to give it. In her diary Vera ascribed Arthur Brittain’s opposition to his lack of a public school education, accusing him of ‘unmanliness ... especially after we read in the Times of a mother who said to her hesitating son: “My boy, I don’t want you to go, but if I were you I ...”