“... up to and in The Sentimental Bloke did it to perfection, there is much enjoyment to be gained, but little edification about how the Australian lyric poet is to go about squaring his personal upbringing with the cultural heritage of the language in which he writes. It is easy enough now to say that Dennis did the wise thing. He set out to write popular art and ...”

“... into a description of the poems he hopes to write in the future, which include an epic on King Arthur. A Latinist as good as Milton might remind us (though his editors curiously do not) that the single usage of ‘turgidulus’ in classical poetry means something like ‘welling up with tears’ rather than ‘turgid with self-regard’. But once that ...”

“... verse translation of Homer before 1598 would have made Homer, or anyone with an ear, groan. Arthur Hall, from Grantham in Lincolnshire, had trundled out ten books of the Iliad in flat, heavy fourteeners in 1581. Hall did not work from the Greek, or even from the Latin, but from Hugues Salel’s French translation, which was in turn translated from a ...”

“... Black draws on the work of pioneering scholars such as William Leuchtenburg, Frank Freidel and Arthur Schlesinger, but he also incorporates a large amount of original material from the Roosevelt Library. And although Black credits a number of research assistants, the argument bears his personal stamp. For FDR, somewhat improbably, turns out to be his great ...”

“... alone in a London park for two hours during their elopement while he called on the critic Arthur Symons. ‘She thought he would not return,’ Ellmann says. Empson considered it a libel on Nora’s character to imply that she ran away with a man of whom she could think so dimly, and he was not persuaded when he tracked down the source in the ...”

“... Sixties, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. Jewish intellectuals paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.Fear of alienating Gentiles by emphasising the distinctiveness of Jewish experience was always a problem for American (as well ...”

“... really foreign was happening on one of these family holidays was when we took shelter in a little café-cum-shop somewhere in North Wales and all the other customers were talking in a language I couldn’t understand. Although quite gratified in retrospect by this evidence of authentically local culture, my parents were clearly made uncomfortable by it ...”

“... enough truth to make Hester recant, but not for long; she married Piozzi in a Catholic ceremony a little over a year later in July 1784 (a few months before Johnson’s death), and spent the next two and a half years honeymooning on the Continent, far from her children, happier than she had ever been. Queeney’s estrangement from her mother left a void (her ...”

“... the very great artists of our time’, as the museum curator Peter Selz thought, or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image as a ‘loveable, fantastical ...”

“... now wasn’t the first instance of its kind. A hundred years before, the poets Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, with a number of their Cambridge friends, had been heavily involved in a conspiracy to free Spain from despotic Bourbon rule. The leader was General José Torrijos, a romantic veteran of the Peninsular War who was living in exile with other Spanish ...”

“... soon’, a recurring phrase in Pedersen’s book. After all, the wording of the covenant applied little forward pressure, certainly nothing in the nature of a timetable for self-government. Without the anti-colonial animus of the Americans, no such pressure developed as the years went by. Oddly enough, only Germany, when it was admitted to the League in ...”

“... Mother, Earth Mother or Mother Goddess. Distinguished scholars pioneered the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison, who proposed a prehistoric and peaceful woman-centred civilisation in Greece. The discovery of Palaeolithic ‘Venus figurines’, statuettes with exaggerated breasts and ...”

“... But his social climbing can be exaggerated. Tyndall’s London life changed remarkably little over time. Until he was in his sixties he lived in the apartments of the Royal Institution and he had few possessions. He never sought or received honours from the state, and resigned as a government adviser on lighthouses in protest at the Board of ...”

“... considered far more difficult to manage than men. Misconduct in Holloway, the prison inspector Arthur Griffiths insisted in 1870, was ‘intensified by hysteria, and those unsexed creatures respect no authority. At times the place is like a pandemonium.’ Selina Salter, one of the working-class prisoners Davies studies, was reported to have destroyed ...”

“... broader public. Many of them were historians, including Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam. But none of these ‘public intellectuals’ reached a larger audience or had a greater social and political impact than C. Vann Woodward, whose books ...”