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“... East End tenement block, while Samuel’s puts between hard covers the ordered reminiscences of Arthur Harding, a man described to the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Police in 1907 as ‘a most slippery and dangerous criminal’. In their way, both books are irritating, inadequate, even incoherent: but they also give a vivid, horrifying, unforgettable ...”

“... from the knight who is questioning him, as it indicates high status. He determines to go to King Arthur and get himself made a knight. Before he sets out, his mother gives him instructions on how to behave in the world, and tells him something of his own history how his father and brothers were killed in combat and she had withdrawn to the forest to preserve ...”

“... making appropriate crude gestures. He has earlier defined fiction writers as authors who ‘invent little people’, but we see here that they can invent big, loud people too. Monk has some difficulty in persuading his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz), to take 0n this extravagant book, but ...”

“... At a friend’s house, I saw a video of Liebelei, Max Ophuls’s beautiful film of Arthur Schnitzler’s play which was shown on television some months ago. Made in 1932, this masterpiece is a rarity: although the Third Reich censors removed Ophuls’s name from the credits and he left Germany on the day after the Reichstag fire, it was banned by the Allied Commission when the war was over because its success had happened to coincide with the Nazi regime ...”

“... de Wolfe was. Impeccably dressed in Poiret or Mainbocher, chummy with dukes and screen idols, little Madge from Melbourne seemed to make herself grand through an act of fiat lux. Esther Murphy on Long Island, 1923. Summing up his long and loving friendship with the self-thwarting Esther Murphy in The Fifties (1986), Edmund Wilson recalled how ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”

“... though, there would be nothing: no Murderer’s Who’s Who, no Yorkshire verse, no New Zealand little magazines. To guard against such barren stretches, we invariably had one or two ‘timeless’ items on the go: foreign stuff, mostly, since no one knew when that was out of date, but now and then something solidly domestic – jokey items on the ...”

“... the heir to a marquisate who wishes repeatedly that his brainless and hearty younger brother, Arthur, could inherit instead. ‘Sainty’ Belchamber has no taste for games, girls or money; in his new introduction to the novel, Edmund White calls him a ‘sissy’, which is about right, though, oddly, Cissy is the name of the pitiless young woman Sainty is ...”

“... in May. One was short and weedy, with bony shanks and a hungry countenance, the other was a little taller and a deal bulkier, but bloated of face and generally flabby. They were dressed in a soiled and tawdry imitation of their betters, and each looked every inch the gallows-bird that he was.’ A couple of adjectives too many, perhaps, but it would be ...”

“... institution. Some sections of this short collection of essays by past or present PEP workers are little more than catalogues of worthy research projects. But PEP (since its merger in 1978, now the Policy Studies Institute) has rarely been flatulent or woolly-minded, and the contributors, not always intentionally, reveal quite a lot about a characteristic ...”

“... with the conduct of the Navy. This led to a controversy with the other great Naval authority, Arthur Marder, which was the delight of all observers. Roskill was not content to write voluminous books. Becoming a Fellow of Churchill College somewhat late in the day, he took charge of the archive which he and the college were accumulating and made it among ...”

“... in British painting in the 1840s and to a taste which survived well into this century in Arthur Rackham’s book illustrations, with their tangled roots and wrinkled goblins, and in the misty lakes and moonlit forests which were the essential settings for so many pantomimes and ballets. The key figures in the 1840s – Richard Dadd, Joseph Noël ...”

“... the age of 49, he has produced a second. Who can blame him? His father was a conman and impostor: Arthur Samuels Wolff, aka Arthur Saunders Wolff III, aka Saunders Answell-Wolff III, the ‘Duke’ of Tobias’s brother Geoffrey’s memoir, The Duke of Deception (1979). As the memoirs of both Wolff brothers show, the father ...”

“... Pauline said to me after dinner when we were sitting in front of the fire in her sitting-room. Arthur said: ‘Well, I’ll leave you girls to get on with it. I’ll be in my study. I have work to do.’ We all know Arthur keeps his pornography collection in his study. I lit up a cigarette, gave my usual few coughs, and ...”

“... All the Cowboys’ Horses I was trying to remember who shouted out ‘Wakey Wakey!’ Was it Arthur Askey? I couldn’t understand how Kay Kendall and Denholm Elliot slipped through my fingers. Even my favourite biscuits melted on the tip of my tongue. A prayer went missing, as if I wouldn’t be needing it again ...”