“... way of evidence, Adamski provided photos of the Venusian spaceship. Not everyone was convinced – Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that the pictures bore an ‘uncanny resemblance to electric light fittings with table-tennis balls fixed underneath’ – but thousands were, and Adamski became an international sensation. His book Flying Saucers Have Landed ...”

“... their father’s permission was needed and he was reluctant to give it. In her diary Vera ascribed Arthur Brittain’s opposition to his lack of a public school education, accusing him of ‘unmanliness ... especially after we read in the Times of a mother who said to her hesitating son: “My boy, I don’t want you to go, but if I were you I ...”

“... It was Florida, and in particular the resort of Long Key, to which he was first invited by Judge Arthur Powell in January 1922, that established for Stevens the geographical polarities that came to serve as his dominant metaphor for irreconcilable opposites. ‘We must come together as soon as we can and every winter afterwards,’ he wrote back to Elsie ...”

“... Europeans seeking to surrender military responsibilities in exchange for wealth and comfort. Donald Trump expresses something close to this sentiment in his complaints about European free-riders. Others attribute its origins to the persuasive powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the chief prosecutors were Jewish. One of them was the 24-year-old Roy Cohn, now best known as Donald Trump’s mentor in his Studio 54 days. We would clean up after ourselves.The prosecution’s case depended almost entirely on the testimony of the Greenglasses. Ruth testified that in 1944 Julius had asked her to visit David in New Mexico and to persuade ...”

“... school’ approach to the Vietnam War, led by people like David Halberstam and Arthur Schlesinger. The problem is that a close scrutiny of classified documents will not bear it out: ‘For Kennedy, as for Johnson, in fact, it was the President who was deceiving the public, not his subordinates who were deceiving him.’ Ellsberg came to ...”

“... and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that the theme shouldn’t be ‘How did a rich boy come to be so idealistic?’ but ‘How did a cripple come to have some success?’ By ‘cripple’ he meant mental not physical ...”

“... consoling narratives, not of courage and ‘dash’ in death, but of happiness in a new life. Arthur Conan Doyle and his friend Oliver Lodge, an eminent physicist, both lost sons and were ardent spiritualists. In 1924 Conan Doyle sent Lodge a photograph of the Cenotaph taken the previous Armistice Day during the two-minute silence. It shows a white miasma ...”

“... published a pamphlet of Peter’s. I never worked out how interested he really was in poetry. Donald Hall says that he was more interested in drinking beer than in poets. How old would he have been then? Must have been in his thirties. I never thought Oscar had opinions; he would just stroke his beard and smile.Who decided on the minimalist layout for the ...”

“... As with Havel once, I seem to be the only playwright not personally acquainted with the deceased Arthur Miller and with some line on his life and work. Many of his plays I still haven’t seen, though years ago when I was reading everything I could get hold of on America and McCarthyism I came across Miller’s novel Focus, in which a character begins to ...”

“... pressure, Zukerman lost his job as a New York correspondent for the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Arthur Lourie, the Israeli consul general in New York, exulted in his firing: ‘a real MITZVAH’.Zukerman wasn’t alone. In 1953, the American Reform rabbi Morris Lazaron recited a prayer of atonement in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, declaring ‘we have ...”

“... answer, he proceeded to pour the wine over the back of my hand. Just a few years earlier, in 1969, Arthur Corbett, first husband of the famous male-to-female transsexual April Ashley, sought an annulment of their marriage on the grounds that at the time of the ceremony, Ashley was ‘a person of the male sex’. In the course of the proceedings, Corbett ...”

“... salvageable; a review he wrote for Commentary included a line about ‘the retarded conscience of Arthur Miller, the ballplayer for whom Marilyn Monroe consented to be circumcised’). In 1959, Doubleday published Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems, 1938-58, which won the Bollingen Prize on the strength of the early work (only three poems from ...”

“... nearly wrecking talks on strategic arms limitation (Ford’s young, hawkish secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, had successfully called for a freeze on Salt II). Castro was taking big risks, but as Gleijeses argues, his adventures in Latin America had reached an impasse, while Africa still offered opportunities. Cuba had its anti-imperialist credentials to ...”