“... acceptable, at least within the confines of our television sets, and as a result perhaps beyond. Arthur Daley and his ‘Minder’, for example, are commonly regarded as harmless, comic, lovable folk heroes, who can be forgiven even if they do sometimes wander onto the wrong side of the law, and get in trouble with ‘the Bill’. Indeed, both George Cole ...”

“... on minds and events. It is not too much to say that this strange, self-educated, self-propelled little woman deserves a place among the makers of modern India. The temptation is to draw a continuous line from the first royal charter granted by another warrior queen on the last day of 1600, through the 18th-century acts imposing parliamentary control, to the ...”

“... intellectuals from Liberals to Socialists, enjoyed a uniquely privileged position within his firm. Arthur Mann, editor of the Yorkshire Post, personally precipitated the Abdication crisis and had the fullest confidence of his publishers. The most powerful editor of those days was Geoffrey Dawson of the Times. He ended up in disgrace after suggesting the ...”

“... a hospitable refuge.’ The seasoned and sensible David Collins, once the right-hand man of Arthur Phillip, the governor of New South Wales, in Port Jackson, now lieutenant governor of the Van Diemonian settlements, responded to diminishing supplies by ordering the purchase of kangaroo meat ‘at 6d per pound from any person who may deliver such at the ...”

“... Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, poet and ex-poet, took a 41 shoe – about a seven and a half in British sizes, an American eight. We have his own word on this, in a letter written shortly before his death at the age of 37, requesting a stocking for varicose veins. The jaunty teenager smoking a pipe in Verlaine’s famous sketch – dearer to Rimbaud’s admirers than the simpering soul in Fantin-Latour’s group portrait of the same year – has elegant legs ...”

“... Hamlet, rather than Shakespeare’s, that we should feel obliged to discuss. Bradshaw has little difficulty in showing Hamlet’s sceptical doubts about the ghost to be a mainspring of the play’s ambiguity – easily dismissing Prosser’s thesis that Elizabethans would automatically have seen the ghost as a instrument of darkness. But here ...”

“... they could have burst through with just a few more reinforcements, or better leadership, or a little luck. Talk of ‘missed opportunities’ was rife, and there was much resentment among both troops and junior officers towards the politicians and senior officers behind the lines who had got them into the mess in the first place, and now seemed too ...”

“... summer school. It was like being on vacation from home, and at three o’clock, I was always a little disappointed to walk the four blocks to the grocery store my parents owned, the New Saigon Market, where English was hardly ever spoken and Vietnamese was loud.He has imbibed his fears from the American tradition: memories of ‘The Fall of the House of ...”

“... newspapers all over the world. In due course, a bankrupt butcher in Wagga Wagga, originally called Arthur Orton though at the time going by the name of Tomas Castro, slyly admitted that he was indeed Roger Tichborne, who would by now have been a baronet and the owner of the large Tichborne estate in Hampshire. And on Christmas Day 1866 he arrived in London to ...”

“... levels higher, twenty ceilings below, Blueprinting every floor of the building, Floating each a little, draining it slowly away Down chutes, round U-bends. Hung-over minibar glasses Emit high pings, a dawn chorus of different pitches, Conjuring water, till this suite itself Gurgles like a basin, though each room’s extractor-fan dry. Freshets under ...”

“... Arthur Rimbaud, the boy who gave it all up for something different, is a legend, both as a poet and a renouncer of poetry. He had finished with literature before the age of 21. By the time his work began to appear in the 1880s, to great acclaim, he had become a trader and a minor explorer in inhospitable country, working for a French company in Aden which sent him across the Red Sea to run a branch of the business – coffee, hides and ivory for the most part – in the town of Harar, between the Ogaden and the highlands of Abyssinia ...”

“... no one could be sure they were dead, and not escaped abroad, or living under assumed names. The little Earl of Warwick remained alive and shut away. But for the rest of his reign Henry VII would be plagued by pretenders, persistently rising from the dead. Because she was a girl Margaret did not represent the same threat. No one would stage a rebellion in ...”

“... and his manner of handling it. Although his Selected Poems span twenty years, there is remarkably little change or development. The themes remain constant: his family, animals, the countryside, travel. Holbrook is content to keep his vision modest, though he likes to ruminate on the passage of time and the limitations of feeling. He writes a conversational ...”

“... to see the conflict from the perspectives of the individuals most directly involved. Now Max Arthur’s fascinating collage of soldiers’ reminiscences gives a voice to a group who are not generally believed to have (or to be entitled to) one, while John Conroy’s account is that of a sympathetic outsider nervously learning the codes and concerns of a ...”

“... East End tenement block, while Samuel’s puts between hard covers the ordered reminiscences of Arthur Harding, a man described to the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Police in 1907 as ‘a most slippery and dangerous criminal’. In their way, both books are irritating, inadequate, even incoherent: but they also give a vivid, horrifying, unforgettable ...”