“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Coventry. Many of the architects behind this work, such as Frederick Gibberd (designer of Harlow), Arthur Ling (architect of much of postwar Coventry) and a good chunk of the London County Council Architects’ Department, were card-carrying Communists. In the Architectural Review essay, Banham argued – wholly spuriously – that Khrushchev’s public ...”

“... an average speed of barely five knots. They crawled towards their destination, trying to make as little giveaway whitewater wake as possible, and allowing for the blunt, roll-on, roll-off bows of so many of their number. They were lucky with the weather. The voyage was made in a light fog – just enough to make them difficult to spot from the air.This slow ...”

“... Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put together.’ Little has changed. Antiquarian prejudice and ecclesiastical philistinism are in good shape, self-righteous as ever.Gavin Stamp was not of the flock. He was a propagandist, a preservationist, a stern critic and fierce journalist. He was a great historian ...”

“... rural life, moved to Toulouse, where he managed to eke out a living teaching and perhaps playing a little: he was hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight. In April 1944 he was caught in a round-up on the streets of Toulouse and taken to Drancy, the collection point for Jews awaiting murder. He managed to write a note to his brother-in-law, Jan Weevers, and ...”

“... We’re confident it’s real’: Arthur Aron is a psychologist who has discovered that blood-flows in the brains of people claiming to be in love after decades of marriage resemble those of new lovers. Romance may authentically survive: ‘That’s what the brain scans are telling us. People can’t fake that ...”

“... Plan did the opposite. Steil’s hero on the domestic front is another relatively unknown figure, Arthur Vandenberg, Republican senator for Michigan. Vandenberg understood that in order to get Congress to agree funding, and the US public to countenance troops remaining in Europe, another red scare would be needed. Vandenberg advised Truman to ‘scare the ...”

“... vanguard of the ascending bourgeoisie, becomes the lumpen-bourgeoisie in the age of its decay,’ Arthur Koestler wrote. Nowhere in Anglo-America is this phenomenon more evident than in the British media, which even at its most reactionary used to maintain some commitment to wit and style. The Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house ...”

“... the Branghtons’ tenant Mr Smith, who speaks of himself as ‘a man who wishes to have things a little genteel’. Johnson was delighted by this ‘Holbourn Beau’: ‘such a fine varnish of low politeness! – such a struggle to appear a Gentleman!’ Mrs Thrale claimed to recognise just the type from her visits to one of London’s many new places of ...”

“... vote of support from his six-thousand-strong congregation. A debate began about the Jews. Arthur Griffith, who was to found Sinn Fein two years later, supported the boycott in his newspaper, the United Irishman. ‘No thoughtful Irishman or woman can view without apprehension the continued influx of Jews into Ireland and the continuous efflux of the ...”