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“... An ignoble plot-engine, you could say, though one that has been deployed by narratives from King Arthur to Star Wars. Freud called it the ‘family romance’. Stylistically, the books sprawl; Rowling’s prose is laden with adverbs and adjectives, and on any one page characters might speak ‘sharply’, ‘curiously’, ‘impatiently’ and ...”

“... is poor in the Muggle world (his glasses are mended with tape), though he has secret deposits of gold in the magic world, is taunted by the rich, snobbish, cowardly, cruel Malfoy, who is backed by his powerful, manipulative father and talks a lot of proto-Nazi drivel about pure blood. But the true epoch of Hogwarts is medieval: it teaches things like ...”

“... east, ending up in a provincial town in the Volga region, where Bauman finished high school with a gold medal, praised for his ‘outstanding intellectual skills’ and as a ‘social activist’ and ‘good comrade’. The Baumans’ experience in Shakhunya was not as idyllic as in Mołodeczno, but it wasn’t terrible. ‘Not all inhuman conditions ...”

“... the lyric.’Giving a useful biographical sketch of Palgrave (an Oxford pal of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, and an admirer of Tennyson), Bucknell relates his professional work in English adult education to a growing passion for ‘England’s native literature … English history and the values of the English people’. After all, ‘England’s ...”

“... was, he asserted, the people’s choice. The Times followed up the next day with a hatchet job by Arthur Mizener, entitled ‘Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?’ It was, Parini concludes, ‘a sorry moment for American literary culture’. A friend of the author’s declared himself outraged that ‘Americans weren’t rooting for ...”

“... fight For all those gritty doctrines he has spoken On that day when they have to be renounced And Arthur Scargill’s strike bid must be trounced. But Arthur’s rhetoric is like his hair. Though spurious, transparent and bombastic, It’s legal and has some right to be there. The threat it poses to the state is drastic But ...”

“... as cold, unsexy, eminently avoidable and even fit to be slaughtered. One of these, I, Gloria Gold (Judith Summers), opens with Gloria shampooing the hall carpet at midnight but ends with her a much-relaxed woman in a dirtier house, thanks in part to a luscious love affair. In Death of a Perfect Wife (M.C. Beaton) the clean freak Trixie is slain, not ...”

“... to save the pound sterling – was in fact the first casualty, when Britain was forced off the Gold Standard in September 1931, the political coherence of the National Government dominated British politics, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, for the rest of the decade. In fact, it took another crisis, even more desperate, to upset this ...”

“... of folksy clothes: you knew where you were with pictures. ‘Captive Andromeda’ by Arthur Hill (1876). Confusingly, though, the one public building in Bournemouth you might visit in order to see what definitely seemed to be pictures purported to be a repository of the other stuff. This was a building called the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and ...”

“... Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Toynbee, the ...”

“... the Ashmolean’s collection of copies of Greek antiquities, recently acquired by its keeper, Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the palace of Knossos. Several objects, including a fragment of a mural showing a wasp-waisted Minoan jumping over the horns of a bull, she revisited again and again. ‘He seemed not to leap, but to hang above the bull, like a ...”

“... gaol has ever boasted to visitors that his notorious dungeons were chosen as the setting for Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But for over thirty years successive generations of BBC producers escorting guests through the labyrinthine corridors of Broadcasting House past doors bearing inscrutably coded designations have cheerfully informed them that ...”

“... the occasional approach of ‘the ogres that were then still native to this land’. King Arthur is remembered not just as a legend but as someone it was possible to serve. Britons and Saxons live in separate communities but with a certain amount of overlap, any tensions kept below a simmer. You could describe events in the book as dreamlike, except ...”

“... Not long after going down from Oxford he went to Palestine to serve as an aide-de-camp to Sir Arthur Wauchope, High Commissioner of the mandated area. He was appalled to find Jews and Arabs at each others’ throats, a situation which he felt the policies of the Administration in which he served exacerbated. The only organisation he could find in which ...”

“... this month, offers the full span of Tynan’s correspondence, from his first precocious fanmail to Arthur Askey to a final letter of humorous verse to his son Matthew. But it is Tynan’s school and university days that represent the golden age of his letter-writing career. The letters written during this period, particularly those to his friend Julian ...”