“... 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 ...”

“... appearance, has largely reverted in old age to a state of Blakean innocence and moral simplicity. (Little Lamb – you rackety old thing – who did make thee? I have some questions I’d like to ask Him.) True: ravages of macular degeneration notwithstanding, she still spends an hour every morning ‘putting her face on’, with predictably fantastical, Isak ...”

“... the roadside. Tezze is a small town, much prized and fought over for hundreds of years, but with little to impress tourists despite being the site of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery. At the end of a path lined with cypress trees a rectangle of clipped lawn is enclosed by low grey stone walls. Some 356 British soldiers and airmen of the First ...”

“... told it looked as if he was developing ‘full-blown Aids’. It was early 1985. They were given little information. For the first few months, they weren’t sure if Joe really did have Aids. He was 21 and Frankie was 19; they hadn’t been married long. Frankie, they discovered, was pregnant. Joe’s doctors offered them tests, but only vague ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by America’s natural advantages and by what he believed was the good sense of its people. He had little faith in its democratic institutions but great confidence in the unpretentious instincts of its solid citizens – ‘the silent majority’, as Nixon was to call them.Once Kissinger became Nixon’s national security adviser, and later secretary of ...”

“... the Epic of Gilgamesh – to Iraq and Egypt. Individual billionaire collectors in the tradition of Arthur Sackler, most of them based in New York (where by far the greatest share of wealth in the antiquities market is exchanged), continued to buy.Remarkably little has changed in the global political economy of antiquities ...”

“... better than any other singer; see also her meltingly sad rendition of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ in Meet Me in St Louis, a song of consolation which leaves the consoler herself unconsoled. In ‘You Made Me Love You’, she sells the song with such an impression of sincerity and sweet touches of childish humour that you almost forget how ...”

“... the socialist papers (she thinks it’s because some of them were women), though it’s known that Arthur MacManus of the SLP, who worked pointing the needles, was involved. The strike collapsed after three weeks when Singer wrote to its employees asking them to sign and return a postcard with a printed message promising they’d go back to work when ‘you ...”

“... Otherwise you’ll get your fingers burnt.’ Ann Wood recalls: ‘you really needed just a little bit to be apart, or you really did risk annihilation.’ Rosemond Strode, Britten’s last amanuensis, speaks of Aldeburgh as a ‘flypaper’. The mental cruelties that Britten inflicted on people cannot be explained away. Yet it is equally a mistake, and ...”

“... world that was gradually slipping away from my mother’s own consciousness’. On the train, a little girl tells her mother ‘I want to bite you’; in a copy of Marie-Claire, she reads her horoscope, which promises she’ll meet a man, and then spends the day wondering if ‘each man I spoke to’ was the one they meant; at a cashpoint, her card is ...”

“... been able to take a proximity fuse that had been rejected and hide it in a corner of his workshop. Little by little he managed to replace the defective parts until the device was in perfect condition. Then he hid it behind a box on a shelf where spare parts were kept,’ and waited to remove it until Christmas Eve, when ...”

“... far away’, where we begin by identifying a reference to the absence of Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam, in whose memory the poem is written. But at once the phrase ‘but far away’ is shifted into another sentence, and what is becoming audible is ‘the noise of life’. Finally, we face the unhappiness of that noise, the cold rain and the bleak ...”

“... The British governors in the 1920s and 1930s, Sir Ronald Storrs, Edward Keith-Roach OBE and Sir Arthur Wauchope, had much the same experience as Queen Michal. Simon Sebag Montefiore in his biography of the city rather wistfully describes their rule as a golden age in Jerusalem’s history, when decorous gatherings of religious leaders from all faiths might ...”