“... record, including everything from safe-breaking to blackmail – when the Nazi occupiers threw a young hotel dishwasher, Tony Faramus, into the same jail; Faramus became Chapman’s cellmate and friend. At Chapman’s suggestion they both offered to spy for the Germans, essentially as a way of getting themselves out of jail and away from Jersey. Faramus, a ...”

“... about Seamus Heaney. Heaney had been a student in English at Queen’s, Belfast, where my father, Arthur Terry, taught Spanish. And they had both been members of the Group, meeting regularly to discuss one another’s poems and translations. Heaney brought his first poems along, and my father brought his translations, mostly from the Catalan, of poets such as ...”

“... is why it has long employed teams of psychologists to help market its products to children as young as two. Give it a child at an impressionable age, and it will have a customer for life. Ben Rogers is aware of food’s emotional power, and of its ability to create bonds between people. In Beef and Liberty, he has written a whimsical, amusing, informative ...”

“... All they mean, it seems, is that a fierce storm overtook them there and is about to reach Arthur’s camp. But that is not all Bresson means. The forest is the devil, home at the beginning of the movie to all kinds of hacking of human bodies and other knightly violence, headless trunks or trunkless heads spouting fountains of blood, and witness at the ...”

“... but it’s lively, witty and draws effectively on Blum’s massive and eloquent correspondence. Arthur Goldhammer has, as usual, produced a lucid, engaging English text. Birnbaum seems to have written the book in some haste: he repeats facts and quotations, and makes a few historical slips – France was not a ‘largely peasant nation’ in 1936; Hitler ...”

“... my skin’.Nguyen’s less strenuous comparisons are more successful. In ‘War Years’ the young narrator sits astride a ‘dike’ of sacks at the back of the shop, inhaling ‘the clean carpet smell of jasmine rice’. Rice in its cooked state is described as having a ‘warm, wet sock odour’, and later on, while his mother confronts Mrs Hoa in her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... newspapers all over the world. In due course, a bankrupt butcher in Wagga Wagga, originally called Arthur Orton though at the time going by the name of Tomas Castro, slyly admitted that he was indeed Roger Tichborne, who would by now have been a baronet and the owner of the large Tichborne estate in Hampshire. And on Christmas Day 1866 he arrived in London to ...”

“... as wilful – on the contrary, the misbehavers had their counterparts in the horde of priggish young who set about eroding the turpitude of wicked adults, as in the magazine story of 1827 called ‘The Pious Girl and her Swearing Father’: judging by her clinging attitude (she is illustrated with both arms clasped around his neck), he had plenty to swear ...”

“... pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from the enemy. ‘He did well here, and died ...”

“... confide in him that her late husband had a special fondness for a corny musical about King Arthur. But, as a staunch Camelot-scoffer all my life, I was in for a huge shock when Jackie finally died. Every American female I know took it entirely personally. My scoffs were absolutely at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old ...”

“... pioneer interpreter of and midwife to theatre work by Clifford Odets, Sam Behrman, Robert Ardrey, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Robert Anderson and William Inge. He did the same in the cinema with Williams, Robert Sherwood, Inge, Steinbeck and Schulberg. Though he modestly disclaims more than typecast competence on the boards, it should be remembered ...”

“... functions. Andersen Consulting was the only one to have branched off from its parent company, Arthur Andersen, under a slightly different name.The Andersen Consulting new hires were shipped to a programming bootcamp in St Charles, a suburb of Chicago. None of us had cars, so the three weeks there were spent entirely on campus, working overtime, getting ...”

“... and the British one gets off to a startling beginning by bodying forth the ghostly voice of Arthur Conan Doyle, whom one expects to sound like Basil Rathbone. In actual fact he sounds like Gordon Brown. It’s somehow easy to forget that Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, and his voice, recorded in 1930, is here filled with lilting plangencies about the ...”

“... ear, as British here means – but I’m being paranoid; he’s got some other axe to grind: King Arthur … Now there was a male mother, nourishing his men on his own blood, know what I’m saying? I don’t. Sir Bors, Gawain … The warrior’s gone dead in the modern male … I signal my wife let’s go, to no avail: Your wild man’s hurting … I can ...”