“... He resisted joining the many left-of-Labour organisations available. Unlike his friend Arthur Horner, he didn’t become a communist; he didn’t follow Mosley, for whom he co-wrote a manifesto, out of Labour into the New Party, and certainly not into the British Union of Fascists; and he didn’t approve of the decision made by his soon to be ...”

“... Enoch Powell and Lord Hailsham and co-opting left-wing outliers like Tony Benn, Eric Hobsbawm, Arthur Scargill, John Pilger and Stuart Hall. She set about coaxing – and sometimes wrestling – as much emotion and revelation from her castaways as she could, using the unthreatening stimulus of music, and the intimacy created by two people in a dingy ...”

“... to see a critic simply plough Proust’s complex and majestic ideation under the jolly language of Arthur Quiller-Couch. Having stripped Proust of half his wealth, the rest of Bayley’s essay expires into biographical gossip – pauper’s criticism. Bayley’s reviews repeat, at a lower level, the concerns of his more considered work. As Percy Lubbock was ...”

“... with the further advantage of access to the mass of Mansfield documents assembled over 22 years by Arthur Vanderbilt, who died in 1957 just before retiring from his post as chief justice of New Jersey, has now written the comprehensive biography that Vanderbilt had planned to write. The well-known engraving of Mansfield, taken by Bartolozzi from the portrait ...”

“... life and this punitive regime was brutal. And then, when Blunkett was 12, his father died. Because Arthur Blunkett had been working after pensionable age – his employer, the East Midlands Gas Board, had asked him to stay on to train new employees – they initially refused to pay compensation. The resulting legal struggles his mother went through ...”

“... tried to sell the ‘wedge’ strategy to American mass opinion. Wedgism, in any case, achieved little. Tito’s Yugoslavia was saved from economic ruin by American aid, but schemes for luring other Communist states away from Moscow by dangling economic carrots came to nothing. The real test and target of the wedgists was China. But when Mao finally won ...”

“... they didn’t know something about their subject instead of veering off into fiction. They took little notice. Schneer is endearingly open about the holes in the exceedingly tattered and piecemeal record of the Lockhart plot, some the result of weeding and redaction by intelligence services, some the work of nervous letter-burners, some just missing. When ...”

“... will know that this man used to exist.’ The pseudo-sophisticated belief that the Chinese care little about individual or human rights, however difficult these may be to realise in a Chinese context, should not survive a reading of these pages. ‘In my first year at university I felt I was surrounded by people in chains. But occasionally I would read ...”

“... or divined concealed rules. It was the decade, too, of what one might call ludic taxonomy. From Arthur Koestler’s 1942 essay we learnt to divide our friends into yogis and commissars; from Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 book to characterise the world’s thinkers as hedgehogs or foxes; from Nancy Mitford two years later to distinguish between U and non-U. From ...”

“... are not as easily laughed off. Anyone who has read Eating people is wrong and who knew the late Arthur Humphries (professor of English at Leicester, where Bradbury got his first degree) must suspect that the novel’s hero, Stuart Treece, is a portrait from life. Nor could one believe that the portrait (although it is not at all malicious) furnished its ...”

“... yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile to the BBC as Thatcher, denouncing the TV news as ‘pure unadulterated bias’. And so it goes on, with complaints and threats stacking up like Brexit-blocked containers.At the outset, the BBC’s fragile autonomy owed as much to ...”

“... foreign policy’. The bipartisan support for the president’s bombing campaigns shows that little has changed in this respect, however. As Trump ordered strikes on Syria in April last year, Fareed Zakaria hailed the ‘big moment’: ‘Donald Trump,’ he said, ‘became president of the United States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny ...”

“... of their attention. She gives us the domestic detail; records of the Artois courts give us a little more. Like many educated young men of the time, Robespierre cultivated his sensibilities. He wrote a little light verse. He was sociable, up to a point. He had women friends. He could easily have married. Except for his ...”

“... and blame its continuing presence more on multicultural ‘balkanisation’ (the term belongs to Arthur Schlesinger Jr) than on the white resentment which they, in some measure, share. Or in time-honoured minstrel tradition, new Democrats black up political programmes with African American cultural identification: programmes directed against the inner ...”

“... my subjects and has enough money to put us above anxiety and not too much money. Her means are a little more than my earnings and will increase later, but our two incomes together will keep us in comfort.’ They were married in October 1917. He was 52; his new wife, soon to call herself George, was 25. Ezra Pound, best man at the wedding, wrote to John ...”