“... Council sends to Biennales, what’s shortlisted for the Turner Prize, no ‘conspiracy’ in little magazines and private galleries would matter. The Saatchi Gallery, just because it seems so influential in these areas, has acquired a quasi-public status. True, the ‘contemporary art’ camp can be extremely touchy too. There was outrage in 1991, when a ...”

“... The publication of the ODNB has been the occasion for many ‘big compliments’ and rather little nagging. Well-meaning colleagues have rushed to provide me with examples of errors, but since every visit to shelf or screen has left me in a state of head-shaking amazement at the quantity of exact information packed into its pages, I feel no inclination ...”

“... His father – a schoolmaster, modestly successful, upright, thrifty, living well a life of which little was to be expected – outlived him. His first music lessons were with his father (violin) and his brother (piano). When he was eight, he was sent to the local choirmaster for instruction in singing, counterpoint and organ. At eleven, he won a place as a ...”

“... his loathing of the United States, which he didn’t visit until he was 55 and liked as little as he had expected. Back in 1943, he had written home of the possibility of ‘a war with our terrible enemy, America’. Fifty years later, at the time of the first Gulf War, he was arguing that much ‘of our present malaise arises from the abject ...”

“... bloke, though I would much rather have followed you round the world and blacked your boots’. Little else had ever been said, and the few facts have been given their due. The idea of a doubled Housman places him in the 1890s, at the moment of A Shropshire Lad, when the air was thick with such notions. But Housman Country refers the scholar-poet back to ...”

“... of people picking their noses. One began life, as Gopnik puts it, as a picture ofa normal little boy wearing shorts but was soon reworked into a full-frontal of a young man with a shock of blond hair and an adult’s chest hair, completely naked except for a pair of girlish Mary Janes on his feet. There’s no way that anyone who knew Warhol could ...”

“... in the party. Later still, he disowned socialism as the label for his beliefs, and spoke and wrote little about questions of economic inequality. Was this, as some of his critics alleged, to be explained largely in terms of his own increasing social and financial success, his obvious delight in the company of the moneyed and titled, and the waning of an ...”

“... disappeared amid the reverential gloom of Westminster Abbey on Coronation Day in 1953. The Queen, Arthur Bryant rhapsodised, was the foundation of British society; Churchill, in office once again, had greeted her father’s death the previous year with the words: ‘We stand erect both as an island people and as the centre of a worldwide Commonwealth and ...”

“... militance of the Scottish labour movement was fatally undermined by the hubris of the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, forcing the Scottish left ‘to look to the nationalists as a bulwark against “English” politics’.At its root, Lloyd argues, the case for independence relies ‘on seeing England, or Englishness, or the English, as malign influences on the ...”

“... that they would free their slaves as soon as they won independence. Take the case of Lt Col. Arthur Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards. An opponent of slavery, Fremantle initially supported the North but was repelled by Seward’s early bombast and soon developed a fascination with the rebel cause. He applied for leave of absence to visit the scenes of ...”

“... included von Neumann, the physicist Eugene Wigner, the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the novelist Arthur Koestler. Michael attended the Minta, qualified as a physician, served as a military doctor during the war, and, having had himself baptised, married a Catholic. (Polanyi’s maternal grandfather had been the chief rabbi of Vilna, so that was a rapid ...”

“... to get so much publicity, and the BBC was considering a new schedule which pitched stars such as Arthur Askey, Gracie Fields or George Formby against Joyce. Eventually, the Corporation chose Norman Birkett, a well-known lawyer, who began to make weekly broadcasts at the same hour as Haw-Haw. Goebbels was exultant: ‘They want to put somebody up to talk ...”

“... who deserved to live in dignity. ‘The future of the hemisphere did seem bright with hope,’ Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote after JFK announced the Alliance for Progress, which promised ‘homes, work and land, health and schools – techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuelas’. JFK ‘pronounced the Spanish manfully’, Schlesinger said, ‘but with a ...”

“... epistolary tribute:Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor + Amenophis IV in profile … If you consider what the above Names have severally done for me, you will know what you are doing. And you have fixed my Life ...”

“... ran a shuttle to Milan, where Songangol staff were offered technical training. The US consultant Arthur D. Little was hired to show the company’s managers around the energy markets and help them draw up contracts. Marc Rich, the controversial trader who founded Glencore – and cut oil deals with Iran at the time of the ...”