“... was lucky to have Robert, but then Charlotte Brontë was perhaps equally lucky to have had Arthur Nicholls. Had Charlotte lived, she might have continued to write good things as private woman and happy spouse, blissfully submitting her letters and manuscripts to her husband’s censorship. Elizabeth was also, in a sense, a conscious and loving ...”

“... has made him a hero to adepts of Deconstruction. In Deconstruction and Criticism(1979) J. Hillis Miller associated Shelley in this character with ‘the co-presence in any text in Western literature, inextricably intertwined, as host and parasite, of some version of logocentric metaphysics and its subversive counterpart’, and quoted the passage in ‘The ...”

“... for the TLS all this time? FW: Yes, though I stopped with a thud when Alan Pryce-Jones left and Arthur Crook came. I think I was too associated in his mind with the frivolity of the Pryce-Jones era. AH: Wasn’t the TLS lively and good under Pryce-Jones? FW: I thought it was, I loved it. It was very unLeavisite, or anything like that. I think it made Leavis ...”

“... and friendly with the Nicholsons.28 March, Palm Sunday. Remember this a propos a joke of Jonathan Miller’s, who, seeing a woman coming back from church holding a cross made of reeds said that it was literally the last straw.1 April. There is currently a row going on about late night raves on Primrose Hill where, lacking toilet facilities on the ...”

“... strong for disliking the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and ...”

“... with several lawsuits, had to issue retractions and apologies, was accused of misrepresentation by Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte’s husband for the last few months of her life, by Patrick Brontë, by Ellen Nussey and many more. The only ones who couldn’t say anything were Charlotte and her siblings.Many of the stories in Gaskell are now familiar to any ...”

“... move up a class was tested by their ability to swim the Avon fully clothed, write a critique of an Arthur Ransome book, climb the Tracker Tree, or spend a night alone in the woods and write about the experience. Classes were voluntary: a young radio buff who had chosen not to learn arithmetic finally begged the music master to teach him long division so that ...”

“... a doodlebug.In a spin-off novella based on the series – the first of twelve such books by Hugh Miller – Dr Legg, the GP who in the first episode will tend to both the pregnant Pauline and the comatose Reg, is married to a young nurse who is killed by an unexploded bomb in the garden of their newly bought home. Dr Legg, whose last appearance in the series ...”

“... they saw, they understood the appeal of the pub. Dissident voices emerge, like that of Inspector Miller in Bethnal Green, who preferred ‘the poor rough’ to the ‘poor quiet’ – they had ‘greater force of character’. The preacher at the Strict Baptists of Streatham was prone to charitable giving without even keeping an account of it: ‘Love for ...”

“... a catchphrase. By Christmas 1939, a comedy revue had opened at the Holborn Empire starring Max Miller and called, simply, Haw-Haw; there were dozens of stage acts, impersonators and songs (‘And yet in the winter it’s rather pathetic/ He’s frozen to death, ‘cause his pants are synthetic/Lord Haw-Haw, the Humburg of Hamburg,/The comic of eau de ...”

“... his lawyer grandfather had emigrated to the US in 1828 from Glasgow. His father, then Captain Arthur MacArthur, already had genuine military credentials, despite his lowly rank. MacArthur Sr had enlisted in the US Army as a student during the Civil War, from which he emerged, aged 21, a full colonel. Joining the regular army, he dropped in rank to second ...”

“... Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the ...”

“... is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known head shots are from his twilight ...”

“... on her psychology teacher, the 24-year-old John Money. In Frame’s probationary year teaching at Arthur Street School, she stiffened, avoiding the staff teas. This is where her autobiography and King’s retelling, based on interviews, diverge, but in both she swallows a packet of aspirin, and wakes the next morning relieved – nose bleeding, ears roaring ...”

“... the troublesome ‘mad Mullah’ of Somaliland, who was bombed into submission within a week. Arthur (Bomber) Harris was a squadron leader in the Third Afghan war of 1919, and pioneered the strategy of ‘control without occupation’ in Iraq, which entailed sprinkling fire on straw-roofed huts: ‘within forty-five minutes,’ Harris reported, ‘a ...”