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“... 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 ...”

“... here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.Where would Arthur Russell fit on the Chechnya index? Breathless dance tracks like ‘Is It All over My Face’, ‘Go Bang!’ and ‘Kiss Me Again’ are definitely way too allegro. But his album World of Echo, from 1986, is so languid it could only dream of one day being ...”

“... Arthur Benson​ never stopped dreaming about his father. Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped dead saying the Confession in 1896 – he sank onto his prayer cushion and didn’t get up again – but nearly twenty years later his son found him crouched in the cupboard under the stairs, dressed in his purple cassock and playing with some toys: ‘Papa … giggled; then he said: “But now that you have found me out, you must run down here as often as you can, and we will have a good game at something – You don’t know what fun it is ...”

“... to their church, wire funds to relatives in Vietnam and keep money in the bank. They also hide gold in the rice jar and jewellery in a fireproof safe hidden in the crawl space under the house. Fear of burglars persuades them to leave out tempting decoys, so that intruders will just grab and run – a conspicuous vase full of coins on a shelf near the front ...”

“... of Edward IV in the male line. The king was poised to celebrate the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon. The splendid pageants and tournaments that accompanied the match made much of the king’s achievements. They stressed the ‘rich mount’ of his prosperity, playing on the name of his father’s earldom ...”

“... prolific: These things are there. The garden and the tree The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold The woman in the shadow of the boughs The running water and the grassy space. They are and were there. At the old world’s rim, In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest ...”

“... The Wall, was written between 1956 and 1961 and published posthumously in 1989. Its narrator, Arthur Landau, remembers the immediate aftermath of the war in ‘the city’, which is still Prague, and his émigré life in ‘the metropolis’, which is London. Arthur is a freelance scholar immersed in an interminable ...”

“... houses were made to look like ships, with rails, portholes and decks or ‘sleeping porches’. Arthur Bliss’s house Pen Pits, built in 1935 well inland in Somerset, featured exterior ladders from roof to sun deck. Meanwhile in real ships the deck became as much a social space as the interior, swimming pools were moved outdoors and decor streamlined. Most ...”

“... from monumental aspirations. The present exhibition includes the preparatory study in ‘gouache, gold paint and ink on paper’ for murals showing the story of Perseus, intended for the home of the young Arthur Balfour. Here we also see how the reluctant action of his figures can be accompanied by dynamic and even violent ...”

“... to the prompt for my own back-country tourism. I was in pursuit of my Scottish great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair, from Turriff in Aberdeenshire. In a chapbook, The Story of His Life and Times as Told by Himself, published in Colombo in 1900, Sinclair briskly sketches a career that had some parallels with John Clare (an elective Scot when the humour took ...”

“... that the time had come to make money out of Africa, like everyone else. Instead of digging for gold or diamonds, he turned to supplying ostrich feathers for fine ladies back home. Four years after hoisting the Union flag he and his wife (a ‘brick’ of a girl, not his first choice) rented their house at £50 a week to the members of a Royal Commission ...”

“... two people, Maggie. That’s what it’s for.’ Thus Quentin, the tormented Prospero-figure in Arthur Miller’s autobiographical play After the Fall. Maggie replies by eating a handful of pills, and the scene then twists and turns between Quentin’s acknowledged guilt and his defiant belief that she would have done it anyway. Miller survived the long ...”

“... but he might just as easily have made Faramus the central character. Chapman was patriotic in an Arthur Daley sort of way, willing to rally to the cause but always on the qui vive for dodgy little earners, a theft here, a con trick there. He was unfaithful to any number of women, robbed people he was quite fond of and, although he formed an enduring ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”