“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mind busy by working on a verse translation of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, which earned her ‘a little glory’ among those ‘intimate friends’ who saw it in manuscript. To attempt to render Lucretius’ difficult Latin in English was daring enough; to do it in elegant and coherent rhyming couplets was an achievement unattempted by anyone before and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... aren’t a coincidence. Fidesz has been advised by American political consultants including Arthur J. Finkelstein, who began his career advising Nixon. According to Szelényi, the party has used the issue of gender ‘to bind together markedly different groups, such as committed Catholics, the less educated elderly and even radical football ...”

“... from the London School of Economics. He made his way to Dubai via jobs at the now defunct Arthur Andersen and the giant Saudi investment enterprise Olayan. In Dubai, he wheeled and dealed his way into the takeover of a former imperial trading company called Inchcape, which by the 1990s was involved in shipping, logistics, the automotive trade and ...”

“... figures in the new cabinet were the ‘big five’: MacDonald, Snowden, Thomas, Clynes and Arthur Henderson. Henderson, who became home secretary, had lost his seat in 1923 and required a by-election to return to the Commons. The remaining cabinet roles were filled by men who represented the various strands in the Labour movement. Some, such as William ...”

“... burial place remains unknown, and in Welsh folk memory he enjoys a reputation comparable to King Arthur. Meanwhile the English Prince of Wales (soon to be Henry V, victor of Agincourt) displayed his own heroism in a fight with the rebel Harry Percy, better known as Hotspur. In a pitched battle in 1403, the 16-year-old prince led his father’s rearguard. He ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had just been laid off from digging the Regent’s Canal, while another member of the committee, Arthur Thistlewood, urged them to bring ‘a spike-nail in the end of a stick or anything that would run into a fellow’s guts’. The subsequent riots were the worst since the Gordon riots of the 1780s, ending in chaos and a humiliating failed attempt to suborn ...”

“... seat, in Manchester North West, which had a substantial Jewish electorate. In December 1905 Arthur Balfour resigned after his short, fraught spell as Tory prime minister, and the new Liberal government called an election which they would win by a landslide. Having already spoken against Balfour’s Aliens Bill, which was designed to restrict Jewish ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his writing apart from endless rounds of socialising and travel. His father was Charles ‘Good-time Charlie’ Merrill, cofounder of Merrill Lynch, who earned his moniker through prodigious accumulation of money and women. James ...”