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“... earlier’. Twenty-four years earlier – that is, about two seconds later – two children, Na Young and Hae Sung, climb a hill on the outskirts of Seoul. They have just left school and Na Young is crying because Hae Sung has, for once, got better marks than she did. He says she’s a psycho, which is apparently meant as ...”

“... much of the known world. By these standards the betrothal of their fifth child to Prince Arthur of England was small beer. But not for England: the marriage of two successive heirs to the throne to the same daughter of the most formidable and militantly Christian monarchy in Europe represented the arriviste Tudor dynasty’s eager quest for ...”

“... The man whose tears she wiped away with a sock was the remote and fastidious Oriental scholar, Arthur Waley. At the time of this incident he was about sixty years old, ‘one of the most retiring men on earth, a typical scholar, whose real life is spent among his books and documents and about whose personality the public knows practically nothing’. This ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the difficulty of converting between them. Travelling through France just before the Revolution, Arthur Young was distressed at the ‘infinite perplexity of the measures’ used: ‘They differ not only in every province, but in every district and almost every town.’ A quarter of a million distinct units of weights and measures were employed in ...”

“... had been almost literally a serf. His father, a tanner, had served under Napoleon and reared young Louis in the cult of the Emperor. In maturity Pasteur continued to honour the imperial virtues – authoritarian order and utilitarian science – as the midwives of modernity: campaigning for the Senate from his native Jura in 1876, he told voters that ...”

“... since fully grown and each of them enmeshed in his own particular form of unhappiness, none of Arthur Friedland’s sons could recall whose idea it had actually been to go to the hypnotist that afternoon.’ The risk is that a memorable opening section, elaborately orchestrated, leaves a novel with nowhere to go, or at least with the obligation to start ...”

“... habits a few years later, when naming one of his most effective poems ‘The Penny Whistle’. Arthur Ransome in turn may well have recalled that poem, which evokes a charcoal-burners’ camp at night, when in 1930 he had the four Walker children, his ‘Swallows’, meet the two Billies, an ancient man and his elderly son, at work in the woods above their ...”

“... a man of letters.Mary Ellen’s first marriage, in January 1844, was to Eddy Nicolls, a gallant young naval officer. They moved to Ireland, where Nicolls was in command of HMS Dwarf, the first screw-propelled vessel in the Navy; the couple seem to have become acquainted through Peacock’s interest in steam navigation. Mary Ellen was soon pregnant, but in ...”

“... turn of the last century: Richard Roberts, his wife Anne, their sons Robert, Richard E(llis) and Arthur, their daughter Margaret, and three servants – the cook, Sarah Reece, and two teenage housemaids, Emily Lunmir and Ethel Bailey. The eldest son, William, must have already moved out. In his will, my great-great-grandfather ‘desired it to be known that ...”

“... with’, sneak down to the camp after last orders. Esther hasn’t told her father about Colin. Arthur Evans is a ‘staunch nationalist’: he’s only been to England once, to a rally in Hyde Park in 1937 to protest against the conviction of the three Plaid Cymru leaders who set fire to the RAF bombing school – or training camp, depending on your point ...”

“... cage of a new type that can be slipped between two combs in the brood chamber’) by a distressed young woman posing, rather pointlessly, as a local journalist. This fails to deceive Holmes for a moment – for has she not sent him a handwritten letter from a private address? – and the real occasion of her visit turns out to be anxiety over her ...”

“... 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 fairness at least, to look at the possibility that that verdict is wrong. Let us suppose – as Arthur Scargill invites us to – that it was forced upon them: that, as he also claims, it was a victory. There are two sets of reasons for believing that there was no choice but to fight an opponent who had declared war. Geoffrey Goodman makes the first ...”

“... waists’. Perhaps in that moment, or more likely in this much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir Leslie, as a younger version of herself, the one she dramatised in her novel Octavia, ‘brought up in an atmosphere of Scotch austerity’ but with ‘a spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her ...”