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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 ...”

“... was to get words deliberately wrong, and allow the commentary to continue none the less. Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling was usually the fall-guy: INTERVIEWER: Sir Arthur, where did you strat your work? SIR ARTHUR: I think it can be said of me that I have never ever stratted my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... On 5 November last year, Dr Leonard Arthur was found not guilty of attempting to murder John Pearson, a baby with Down’s syndrome, who had died while under his care. Mrs Nuala Scarisbrick, the Hon. Administrator of LIFE, commented: ‘The verdict gives carte blanche to doctors to give treatment to patients who are unwanted or handicapped or both, that will result in their death ...”

“... Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, poet and ex-poet, took a 41 shoe – about a seven and a half in British sizes, an American eight. We have his own word on this, in a letter written shortly before his death at the age of 37, requesting a stocking for varicose veins. The jaunty teenager smoking a pipe in Verlaine’s famous sketch – dearer to Rimbaud’s admirers than the simpering soul in Fantin-Latour’s group portrait of the same year – has elegant legs ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that in all its 481 pages there is not the slightest trace of a joke or a sign that the greatest young journalist of his generation ever enjoyed a single book he didn’t serialise, and you might conclude that Full Disclosure should be consigned to everlasting fire. You would be quite wrong. The book is thoroughly absorbing. It is a dark tragedy, the chief ...”

“... the heir to a marquisate who wishes repeatedly that his brainless and hearty younger brother, Arthur, could inherit instead. ‘Sainty’ Belchamber has no taste for games, girls or money; in his new introduction to the novel, Edmund White calls him a ‘sissy’, which is about right, though, oddly, Cissy is the name of the pitiless ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... aid of Cecil Parkinson conducted the major decisions of the Falklands War. It so happens that Arthur Tedder was a distant kinsman of my father, who married, after his first wife died, my father’s cousin, ‘Toppy’ Seton (sister of Bruce Seton, alias the first TV Inspector Fabian of the Yard). Because of this double family connection, my parents knew ...”

“... In the annals of French literature, Arthur Cravan is more often a colourful footnote than a sober paragraph. He is usually referred to as ‘the poet and boxer Arthur Cravan’, and this odd-seeming conjunction is often fleshed out with more disreputable terms such as ‘con man’ or ‘adventurer ...”

“... to undermine any attempt by the Labour Government to maintain trade links with the Russians. The young President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, was committed to maintaining these links. His trips to Russia, and especially his plans to sell old aircraft to the Russians, were more than once sabotaged by MI5. The ...”

“... was who patiently explained to him – he considerately passes on the information – what ‘an Arthur J.’ signified in rhyming slang. ‘Arthur J?’ No, a J. Arthur Rank is meant, and the error is not only one of memory but of scansion, a metrical defect rare in a book notable for ...”

“... the Cornish Foundation. They are gathered to decide whether they should subsidise a project which Arthur Cornish characterises as ‘crackbrained’ and ‘absurd’, adding that it ‘could prove incalculably expensive, and violates every dictate of financial prudence’, after which he recommends that, in view of all these disadvantages, they should, of ...”

“... follies in the Mexican jungle. A few old socialites probably remember James as the wealthy young cad who divorced the dancer Tilly Losch instead of letting her divorce him. Even the judge thought it was disgraceful of him, but reminded the jury that Tilly had used hearsay and malice in the hope of blackening the plaintiff’s character and had failed ...”