“... 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 ...”

“... in the mouth. The town square is deserted; the tall-spired church a hulk. There is a cramped little beer-cellar full of gaming machines, but it is decidedly not the old ‘inn’ which stood on the square in the days when Sobeslav was a staging-post between Prague and the southern stronghold of Cesky Krumlov, seat of the powerful Rozmberk family. It was ...”

“... Desdemona’s handkerchief. The peculiar vigour of youthful blood is remembered in Dracula, when Arthur Holmwood agrees with Dr Seward that the latter should offer a transfusion of his own blood to the ailing Lucy, ‘as he is the more young and strong’. Othello is far from the only play or poem of the period to contain references to mummy. In The Merry ...”

“... In 1949 he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in 1949, he described the arrival of Auden on Ischia as having ‘thrown something of a gloom’ over the island (‘Such a tiresome old Aunty’). Before the ...”

“... of Burnt Norton, which he used as the title for the first of his Four Quartets. He visited the little-known manor house in the Cotswolds in 1934 (a year after he had returned from being Norton professor at Harvard) and heard in the word ‘Norton’ an echo of that job, and even of his family – he was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of ...”

“... He walked the corridors mournfully, muttering: ‘I just keep thinking about all those poor little people.’ Racial condescension aside, he meant what he said, and during the days following the test his secretary said he looked as though he were thinking: ‘Oh God, what have we done!’He was a brilliant physicist, a charismatic leader and a skilful ...”

“... else might be possible?’ Christopher, it seems, no longer makes Peter angry. He just makes him a little sad. What he is sad about is Christopher’s inability to see that his militant atheism is just an extension of his earlier Trotskyism. Christopher, Peter thinks, is still hankering for a world in which evil is vanquished and all the mistakes of the past ...”

“... butcher that a fluid would flow down her leg and mix with the sawdust on the floor, a process the little boy beside her would observe with fascination. Other tropes include sessions during which he photographs his bodily wastes, which he’s been saving up for the occasion; cottaging, during which he’s beaten up and repeatedly violated; and a concluding ...”

“... of lectures given at the Jonathan Institute in Washington by George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Arthur Goldberg, Moshe Arens, Eugene Rostow, Paul Johnson, Senator Cranston and many others with similar views. The blurb describes the book as a polemic, which it is, and ‘a comprehensive reasoned analysis’, which it is not. The thesis is that terrorism is ...”

“... companies mattered even in the 1960s, but the conservatively run corporations of that period had little difficulty achieving high ratings. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, corporations started to issue more and more bonds and take on increasing amounts of other forms of debt: Enron was far from alone in this. The debt funded necessary investment, but it also ...”

“... père died of a heart attack at the breakfast table while reading the Manchester Guardian. The little Canettis had loved England, and with their father’s help had joyfully learnt its language: relatives rolled about laughing when Elias recited a French story he had learnt at school with a strong British accent. The father, a gentle, civilised man, hoped ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”