“... adored J.K. Rowling OBE. Is this not taking the antique Englishness of Harry Potter just a little too far? But then I remember that the ‘feasts’ served up at Hogwarts boarding school are of ‘roast beef, roast chicken . . . lamb chops . . . Yorkshire puddings . . . peppermint humbugs’ and the like. All of which is, as the Daily Mail has ...”

“... see angels – but that story, too, turns out to be unfounded. In September 1914 the Welsh writer Arthur Machen published a story called ‘The Bowmen’ in the London Evening News. In it, spectral archers from the Battle of Agincourt come to the aid of the British Expeditionary Force at Mons. To his dismay the story was widely taken as truth, and a ...”

“... feeling for music . . . He had a ready pen (an aunt on his mother’s side was the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy) and was fond of writing light humorous verse, less unamusing to the uninitiated than such productions usually are.’ The most absurd sentence of all in the obituary is this: ‘It was also a definite advantage that he had a mind ...”

“... the hereafter. ‘O for thy voice to soothe and bless!’ cried Tennyson, addressing the deceased Arthur Hallam. ‘What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil.’ At this very moment, the mid-point of the century, spiritualism, an import from America where it had first taken the form of ghostly rappings, offered itself as a means of ...”

“... of the commanders on the Western Front. Over naval affairs the exchanges of heavy fire between Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill reduced all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the ...”

“... relationship with the moral condition of society,’ an important sentence, is attributed to Sir Arthur fforde, whereas it or ginated in the Pilkington Committee’s report and was drafted by Richard Hoggart, then a member of the committee. The phrase ‘the political establishment’ is used several times. It seems to me portentous and vague. I suspect that ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... deranged! I might presume it too truly an inherited disease’), Roy changes tack and asks for his little boy instead. Harry is brought down: ‘It appeared to him that the stranger was of enormous size, like the giants of fairy books: for as he stood a little out of the doorway there was a peep of night sky and trees behind ...”

“... Sawrey and the dale of Newlands, settles there finally and specialises in native breeds of sheep. Arthur Ransome writes stories set in Coniston (and elsewhere) and inspires me and many thousands of other children with tales about families learning to camp and sail and climb and skate and smelt copper. Such for Thompson are the prime markers in the history of ...”

“... slip back into the old ways’, so that he is virtually indistinguishable, at his best, from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Presumably he also lapses back into truth-telling. Finally, a reviewer in the Times, who begins quite as if he knew what he was talking about, ends by remarking that ‘the liveliness of Mr Lodge’s collection seems to contradict his thesis ...”

“... town amid the endless wheat-growing prairie of Saskatchewan. He works in a seedy hotel run by Arthur Remlinger, a handsome, educated American with extreme libertarian views and trouble in his past; we’re told that he had ‘become disenchanted’ with the United States. Dell is supervised by Charley Quarters, a sinister, misshapen Métis (part ...”

“... might require occasional assistance. This amounted to two or three million people. Those a little above them, who still had not the means to secure a decent existence, were even more numerous. All countries in pre-industrial Europe were, of course, poor by modern standards, but Arthur Young, who knew France ...”

“... disappointment, not so much at the excavation site itself (‘where,’ he writes archly, ‘Sir Arthur Evans … is rebuilding the palace’) but at its collection of prize paintings and sculpture, which had been removed to the museum in Heraklion. In the sculpture, he ‘saw nothing to suggest any genuine aesthetic feeling at all’. The frescoes were much ...”

“... Bath’s Tale’, Chaucer has the Wife declare that her tale is set long ago, in the days of King Arthur. Back then the land was ‘fulfild of fayerye’, and the elf queen danced with her company in the green meadows. But that’s all over now. The elves and fairies have been driven out by the friars, who have blanketed the country with prayers and ...”

“... VIII’s Lord Privy Seal and Viceregent, Thomas Cromwell, and those of his lord deputy at Calais, Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle. Most people have heard of the first and few (until now) of the second, though the lives of the two men were closely intertwined. Lisle was in several respects more fortunate than Cromwell. Imprisoned on a charge of treason, he ...”