“... about successful or extraordinary younger sons: about the Duke of Wellington, for instance, who as Arthur Wellesley – the third surviving son of an Anglo-Irish earl – took an ensign commission in the army because it wasn’t clear what else he’d be good at (he was ‘food for powder and nothing more’, his mother said). Rory Muir’s interest is in the ...”

“... men in grey suits to get out its message. It used endorsements from the boxer Henry Cooper and the gold medal-winning Olympic pentathlete Mary Peters; from subsidiary groupings such as Actors for Europe, which included Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers, and Writers for Europe, whose membership ranged from Agatha Christie to Tom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of participants is impressive, especially the American delegation: the dancers and choreographers Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer ...”

“... in a brief but highly visible affair with Chaplin, then at the dizzy height of his fame. The Gold Rush was freshly out. Crowds followed them in the streets of New York. The dedicated dancer, moved by some ‘inner vision’ that Martha Graham, for one, saw in her, was now well on the way to becoming a grande horizontale. Men bought her furs. She let them ...”

“... distinguished’, ‘critically and psychologically knowing’, having a ‘heart of gold’ and ‘humane’ – but Carrington’s unsensational presentation of the Southsea years carries more conviction than Seymour-Smith’s sandcastle of conjecture. Carrington’s view is that Kipling’s version of events is ‘true’ to the feelings of ...”

“... Selected Writings, Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth. Next year’s list will have Good as Gold by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jail-bird, Joyce Carol Oates’s Unholy Loves, Michael Korda’s Charmed Lives, Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers, Bernard Malamud’s New Life, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in ...”

“... honours were flowing in: a knighthood, a new professorship of poetry, which involved bestowing a gold medal on Thomas Hardy in partnership with W.B. Yeats, a supremely embarrassing occasion – all the honours which a literary man with the right attitudes (Edmund Gosse was such another) might expect to receive in those days. Newbolt’s private life remained ...”

“... cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which ...”

“... Leopardi, whom he translated; Pasternak, who ‘has meant more to us than any American poet’; Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese (Tu Fu in particular); Apollinaire, whose ‘Hôtel’ was one of his favourite poems. What comes out of this is a feeling for clarity itself as a kind of mystery, and for the lyrical as a gentle shock. Here’s ...”

“... it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last finished film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her saying, ‘to everyone but me.’ In fact he couldn’t forgive her for having turned Miller into Mr Monroe. ‘Not ...”

“... tabloid-style use of detail or intensives to taint, magnify or belittle, as in ‘300 tons of pure gold a year’ (my italic); and also the tabloid-style reverse, the undifferentiated, intellectually aimless but rallying rehearsal of certain ‘facts’: ‘31 and enormously wealthy’, ‘increasingly wealthy’, ‘now wealthy and with real estate values ...”

“... did – not only Bruccoli and Le Vot, but the earlier Fitzgerald biographers, Andrew Turnbull and Arthur Mizener, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, and Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles from Paradise. Mellow relies so heavily upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages in Invented Lives ...”

“... colour reproduction of a 14th-century Persian miniature, ‘Humay on the Day After His Wedding Has Gold Coins Poured Over Him as He Leaves Humayun’s Room’, has been reproduced back to front, so that the Persian calligraphy in the painting has to be read with the aid of a mirror. This was doubtless the publisher’s error, rather than the authors’, but ...”

“... abortion rate suggests that ‘dating’ in this period implied more than a walk in the park. In Arthur Schnitzler’s Liebelei (sometimes translated as Flirtation), such relationships have little consequence for the prosperous Fritz and his friend Theodor in fin-de-siècle Vienna (so long as the woman isn’t married – Fritz’s downfall comes during a ...”