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“... with acknowledgments to Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, authors of ‘Misia’ ‘I’ve left that great page blank,’ said Mallarmé When asked why he’d not written of his boat. There are such things as mean too much to say. You have to let it drift, to let it float. The man who did the asking was Manet, Whose niece’s journal treasures the reply ...”

“... when talent and privilege meet. This book has several faults but at least one great merit: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have seen that Misia’s personality, even if it can never quite be captured, remains highly interesting for the light it casts on how talent can cohabit with gracious living and yet still keep its distance. Misia features a ...”

“... gate, forgotten in folk song and fable, where nothing seems once and for all but the proximate gold of the final extinction: a slow burn of gristle and bone, like the slaughterhouse fire, that once, on the road to perdition, he traded for ...”

“... and adventurers. Sir Humphrey Gilbert was his half-brother, and more distantly related were Arthur Gorges, a goodish poet who could also captain a ship, and Ferdinando Gorges, a confirmed sailor and adventurer. After a standard-issue early career at Oxford, then the Inns of Court, Ralegh began to mix in courtly circles in the late 1570s. The court in ...”

“... in the category of pictorial arts: a set of tapestries after Raphael’s designs (woven in gold and silver, to be sure) was valued at nearly triple the price of the artist’s painting, The Holy Family, though Raphael’s were among the most highly sought-after paintings in the time. Nevertheless, ‘during the 17th century significant steps were taken ...”

“... and founded a French-speaking conservatoire. Said’s closest friends at Princeton and Harvard, Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in ...”

“... One​ of the most seductive items for sale on the website of Arthur Beale, yacht chandler, is a ‘chart work pack’ for just under thirty quid. It includes an elegant course plotter, two Staedtler pencils, a Staedtler eraser and a pair of brass dividers that looks like a primitive device for lancing an abscess ...”

“... that all her Picassos were upside down. ‘I notice something about Truman,’ says the composer Arthur Gold, ‘whenever he begins to fantasise or tell lies, he looks up. His eyes go heavenward and he doesn’t look at you. Just watch, whenever his eyes go up, whatever he is telling you is not the truth. A sort of 17th-century Madonna look.’ ROBERT ...”

“... was that her grandfather was pushed to his death down a liftshaft in Florence for the sake of his gold watch. It never occurred to me to wonder whether or not this was true. The events it related were too remote – a great-great-grandfather a hyphen too far. My grandmother’s grandfather was pushed to his death down a liftshaft in Florence for the sake of ...”

“... chronicler John Hardyng revived the ‘matter of Britain’, pointedly recounting the betrayal of Arthur by his peers and bemoaning the failures of order and justice that marked the reign of Cadwallader. Elaborate genealogical rolls were produced in commercial quantities, tracing the threatened dynasty’s legitimate descent back through Brutus to Japhet, son ...”

“... translated from ‘The Alliterative Morte Arthure’ King Arthur was on his mighty boat with many men, enclosed in a cabin among copious equipment. And while resting on a richly arrayed bed he was soothed to sleep by the swaying of the sea. And he dreamed of a dragon dreadful to behold that came droning and driving from across the deep, arrowing directly from the regions of the West, swooping with menace over the sea’s wide span ...”

“... Dining at Hatchett’s restaurant in September 1903, Arthur Benson observed his image reflected endlessly and from a variety of angles in mirrors around the room. He was to fill 180 volumes with almost five million words in an attempt to scrutinise and sharpen that blurred mirror image. Diaries can, of course, appear an ambiguous genre: they aim at a natural flow of unself-consciousness, but the diarist cannot remain entirely unaware of the prospective reader peering over his shoulder ...”

“... of war, though translations of Caesar and Machiavelli were printed in Elizabeth I’s reign. Arthur Golding, the translator of Gallic War (1565), made a robust statement of the English crown’s rightful claim to the kingdom of France, the central assumption underlying Henry’s campaigns; while Peter Whitehorne offered The Art of War (1560) ‘for the ...”

“... London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) and West Ham, under the majority ownership of David Gold and David Sullivan, two businessmen who had made their money from pornography, agreed that the club would acquire a 99-year lease on the Olympic stadium. By then, West Ham had gone too far to retreat – not least in resisting the legal challenge from its ...”

“... Arthur Rimbaud, the boy who gave it all up for something different, is a legend, both as a poet and a renouncer of poetry. He had finished with literature before the age of 21. By the time his work began to appear in the 1880s, to great acclaim, he had become a trader and a minor explorer in inhospitable country, working for a French company in Aden which sent him across the Red Sea to run a branch of the business – coffee, hides and ivory for the most part – in the town of Harar, between the Ogaden and the highlands of Abyssinia ...”