“... he could insist on his understanding of constitutional norms, and was encouraged by his secretary Arthur Bigge to think of himself as a neutral facilitator of consensus. He brokered conferences on the future of Ireland in 1914 and 1921, though with mixed results. In 1931 his support helped Ramsay MacDonald hold on to office and form the National ...”

“... gift for juggling. This skill brings the 15-year-old Billy to the notice of Dutch Schultz – aka Arthur Flegenheimer, the most fearsome of the pre-syndicate gangsters – who adopts him for a year as a mascot and gofer. Billy, ‘a capable boy’, goes on to witness various rubbings-out, learns how the numbers racket works and is seduced by Dutch’s ...”

“... to camp gestures. It would be a remarkable compositional skill that could add the necessary little pauses, the twist of irony to the choral texture. Cannily aware that his text might be engorged by the music, Muldoon has fitted it with anti-compositional devices, his own ‘write protect’ labels. If anything consumes anything here, it will be words ...”

“... a problem: you cannot desecrate deconsecrated ground, and a secularised religion should leave little scope for a sacrilegious aesthetic, so how did aesthetic modernism manage to feed what Habermas termed an addiction to the ‘horror which accompanies the act of profaning’? The explanation offered by Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of ...”

“... the sense in which that description applies, for instance, to John Stuart Mill (or even perhaps to Arthur Balfour). Brougham’s intellect could serve him superbly in political life, especially perhaps in the mastery of complex subjects displayed in some of his astonishing speeches. Yet the great 1828 speech on law reform, whether or not Brougham was ...”

“... translation of Eileen O’Connell’s famous 18th-century Gaelic poem, ‘The Lament for Arthur O’Leary’. In a bizarre critical judgment which might be seen as a form of transcendental literary Unionism, the professor asserts that ‘The Lament’ is ‘the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole 18th century’. I find this sweeping ...”

“... low-productivity pits was a crucial problem.’ The social consequences of pit closures seem of little concern to him. Thus his chapter on ‘The Gormley Era’ opens with the declaration that in the late 1960s ‘the industry was now in what I see as the years of consolidation.’ Yet this was a decade when the NCB closed 400 of its 700 collieries, cutting ...”

“... a Privatdozent (unpaid) in Munich, later as professor in Kiel and finally in Berlin. They aroused little interest. His appointment at Kiel was given in the confidence ‘that he would remain faithful in unbreakable loyalty to His Majesty the Emperor and to the Imperial Family’. To Planck that read, not as an empty phrase, but as a sacred duty to which he ...”

“... under fifty years) could not be relied on much for a definition of humanity, since he has had so little time to meet any of the species. Robert Heinlein’s totally self-indulgent The cat who walks through walls (to be acquitted of malignant sexism only on the ground that it is also so innocently pubescent) has made its author two million dollars so far. The ...”

“... absurd animals as men is the mixed one such as ours, which goes on a sort of Jogg Trott with little éclat, with many abuses, as many faults, with a considerable share of tranquillity, and no horrors.’ Bew makes no attempt to rebut the contemporary charge of the Ulster radical William Steel Dickson that Castlereagh was ‘the unblushing betrayer of his ...”

“... in the notion of Baudelaire as an ‘icon of modernity’, yet Baudelaire’s own writings betray little enthusiasm for progress or the future: ‘Poetry and progress,’ he observed, ‘are two ambitious men that hate each other, with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet along a pathway one or other must give way.’ But it was exactly Baudelaire’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... also strikingly different. Beveridge’s Report was formally commissioned by a Labour minister, Arthur Greenwood, and formally presented to another, William Jowitt. The Labour Party, both in Parliament and in the country, was its strongest proponent. And the Labour ministers of Churchill’s coalition had no doubt that the war, as Attlee put it, was to be ...”

“... thrall to the rhetoric of legitimacy, tend to impute to prospective voters the motivations of an Arthur Daley. The rhetoric of democratic politics wavers between moral aspiration and egoism, its talk of profit punctuated now and then by homilies about the family, ‘values’, Jesus and the rest. A conspicuous merit of Habermas’s account is its readiness ...”