“... 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 ...”

“... nothing the man has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance,’ Arthur Deering wrote in Sir Samuel Ferguson, Poet and Antiquarian (1931). Perhaps nothing Muldoon has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance as his attempt to present in A-Z form the entirety of Irish literature in these four ...”

“... arms and armour, he stood in the chilly drizzle over what was said to be the grave of King Arthur and chanted an extended, improvised rabbinical-druidic hymn. It evoked the strength and innocence of Blake’s Albion and ended on what seemed to me, at the time, a strange remark, perhaps a challenge hurled from king to king: ‘British poets are ...”

“... John Wayne played a godlike rancher, was Hollywood’s first serious Billy the Kid movie since Arthur Penn’s 1956 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Left-Handed Gun. Although much concerned with issues of law and order, it is not quite an establishment Western. In it, Billy is (initially) among the good guys and, for a while, Wayne’s protégé. The villains ...”

“... was driven to wish, in the course of the 1895 election, that ‘the working classes would pay a little more attention to the history of the growth of this Empire. I wish they would think more of the questions connected with its further expansion.’ It would be interesting to see a detailed calculation of the proportion of the British population directly or ...”

“... they are caricatures not travesties. The Duke of Wellington, whom she knew when he was still Arthur Wellesley, in fact comes out of it rather well: dry, but kind in his way, and unpompous. She found his famous taciturnity exasperating: ‘tried him on every subject I could muster’ but it was ‘very uphill work’. What she liked was his directness. On ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”