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“... profile, a memorial coin of sadness as we come carrying our seats. To me he has never before been Arthur: I saw him through his unused name, so fitting for a father born in a Scottish Eden: Adam. Caught in the unfamiliar foetal posture of a bronze age burial, he tries to uncurl and honour us with a smile. Of course he is ‘not so dusty’; so he says when ...”

“... him and could not forgive him for being the one who would inherit West Dean. His American cousin, Arthur, was even richer than his father and when Edward came down from Oxford in 1929 he went to New York to spend the winter with Arthur and his wife Harriet. They were childless and it was thought that Edward might ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and eyes scrunched up against the light. In the foreground, often cropped out, is her husband, Arthur. He is sitting down so you can’t see how tall he was. ‘They used to joke that 12 was their lucky number,’ their daughter Helen McKendry told me. ‘He was 12 years older than her, and 12 inches taller, and she had 12 pregnancies.’ Jean McConville ...”

“... and on the whole uncomplainingly unlucky. One can understand why some liked and some pitied him (Arthur Mizener’s biography is called The Saddest Story, the title Ford had wanted for The Good Soldier) but also why some have always found him irritating. He made large and largely just claims for himself, as selfless benefactor of English letters, restorer of ...”

“... over the sinking of the General Belgrano are authoritatively considered by Desmond Rice and Arthur Gavshon. In Paragraph 110 of HMG’s own White Paper, ‘The Falklands Campaign: The Lessons’, we read: ‘On 2 May, HMS Conqueror detected the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, accompanied by two destroyers, sailing near to the total exclusion ...”

“... you were likely to find was a number of chapters about ancient druids – about whom we know very little – followed by a perfunctory coda on modern druids, about whom we know a great deal. Wasn’t this, he asked, obviously the wrong way round? That looks like a rhetorical question with only one sensible answer, but there is a case to be made the other ...”

“... This emphasis entails a corresponding weakness in the personal side of the story. Grandma has little left in the way of personality, and the documentary pressures behind the novel leave little space for retrospect. One senses that in this area the author has imagined more than she has communicated. The occasional ...”

“... Only a few avoid these obvious choices. If memory serves, Sir Thomas Beecham wanted a revolver, Arthur Scargill chose the Mona Lisa, a former Lord Mayor of London sought to have a flower picture by Van Gogh, Dame Ninette de Valois suggested sleeping pills, and a well-known playwright expressed the wish to be accompanied by Lena Horne. Would anyone, does ...”

“... than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did. The philosopher R.G. Collingwood, a close friend from their shared childhood in the Lake District, gave Ransome his entire life savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the ...”

“... naturally tie the hearts of subjects to their sovereigns, love, fear and reverence … he had so little of the first that he was beholden to the other two.’ Plainly, the restoration of the monarchy after the civil wars was not a pleasant business. Among Bacon’s motives for writing was a belief that Henry VII should be better known, and that is also a ...”

“... Pursuing the truth about the McCarthyite witch-hunt via 17th-century Salem, Arthur Miller was one day transfixed by an etching in a library. It had been made by an eyewitness of the original trials, and showed a bearded judge with arms upraised in horror as he watched a covey of girls screaming and clawing at invisible tormentors ...”

“... there was extensively refortified in the post-Roman period, causing some believers in the King Arthur legend to imagine it as the original Camelot, but their imagination will not have stretched to the notion of the Knights of the Round Table grave-robbing for pots. It’s worth pointing out that there is no entry for ‘King ...”