“... like Grand Rapids, Iowa City and Lincoln, Nebraska. She even gave a recital in a small and rackety Gold Rush theatre, now a private residence, just down the street from where I live in San Francisco.) The fortune she acquired by touring was immense. Yet she also seemed to supercharge, rather than deplete, her formidable life-force by means of this ceaseless ...”

“... the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ...”

“... the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test.’ Alchemy was the passion of the age, and nowhere more so than at the Court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. When Dee left for England in 1589, Kelley remained. His bruited alchemical skills brought him fame and ...”

“... with her family. In her autobiography, she describes a landscape that was ‘swamp red, beastie gold, sky grey, railway red, railway yellow, macrocarpa green, tussock gold, snowgrass gold, penny-orange orange, milk white, snowberry white, all lit by the sky of snow light reflected from ...”

“... that extended across Europe into Russia. When she died her great-grandson Albert Frederick Arthur George was five and not in the direct line of succession. Finding himself at the age of 41 seated on Edward I’s coronation chair in Westminster Abbey amid ‘the red, the gold, the gilt, the grandeur’, he was full of ...”

“... Injuries of Class (co-written with Jonathan Cobb, 1972) is as classically, tragically American as Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, only to my mind far richer. Sennett has portrayed other figures who are just as touching and historically illuminating: Rico, the successful, hollowed-out consultant in The Corrosion of Character (1998); Rose in Together, who hated ...”

“... burial place remains unknown, and in Welsh folk memory he enjoys a reputation comparable to King Arthur. Meanwhile the English Prince of Wales (soon to be Henry V, victor of Agincourt) displayed his own heroism in a fight with the rebel Harry Percy, better known as Hotspur. In a pitched battle in 1403, the 16-year-old prince led his father’s rearguard. He ...”

“... to describe as ‘development’. ‘Honey,’ Jagdish Bhagwati observes, ‘attracts flies; gold attracts diggers’; India now attracted economists.* Bhagwati himself is one of the cleverest of the many very clever ones that the country has produced. But he was at pains to explain in his glittering Radhakrishnan Lectures – which form the briefest and ...”

“... an actor. John Wayne is the United States of America.’ O’Hara was urging Congress to strike a gold medal honouring ‘John Wayne, American’. It was 1979, and her co-star in films such as Rio Grande and The Quiet Man was dying of cancer. John Wayne: American takes its title from this Congressional medal. Once you start to look for him, he’s ...”

“... there, but he couldn’t imagine the people in them. From this height, it was easier to place King Arthur in the mist lapping at the Welsh marches, and Titania and Oberon bowered by those fluffy copses, than to populate the market towns with the real millions, one by one. The best you could hope for from a stranger looking down, an American or Arab or African ...”

“... lacked a crucial tattoo on his arm. He was probably in fact a butcher’s son from Wapping called Arthur Orton, who had ended up in Wagga Wagga, had seen the advertisements seeking the Tichborne heir, and had taken advantage of a mother’s grief. The story ‘had everything: toffs, Catholics, money, sex, mistaken identity, an inheritance, High Court ...”

“... although nobody knew exactly where or when. The county’s emergency command system, known as Gold Command, opened up at its base in Quedgeley, south-west of Gloucester, on Friday morning, ready for the worst. The private servants knew too: Severn Trent says it issued an ‘emergency weather warning’ to its managers on Friday. But the company had locked ...”

“... his lawyer grandfather had emigrated to the US in 1828 from Glasgow. His father, then Captain Arthur MacArthur, already had genuine military credentials, despite his lowly rank. MacArthur Sr had enlisted in the US Army as a student during the Civil War, from which he emerged, aged 21, a full colonel. Joining the regular army, he dropped in rank to second ...”

“... Stalin and ‘secret police’ carried out mock arrests and purges. It was in this atmosphere that Arthur Schlesinger Jr published his influential book The Vital Center. He denounced extremism on both right and left and pushed his vision of a ‘liberal anti-Communism’ and a ‘non-Communist left’, but – as Selverstone points out – the book took a ...”

“... Not surprisingly, many servants of the Raj found her views tiresome in the extreme. In 1897, Arthur Godley, later Lord Kilbracken, who was under-secretary for India for 26 years, counselled his boss against republishing the 1858 proclamation to mark the Diamond Jubilee: ‘This is hardly the moment to remind the world that the queen promised to make no ...”