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“... Celeste? Had he been invented sooner, he might have given it a go. There’s an early story by Arthur Conan Doyle called ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’, which appeared anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine in January 1884, three years before the publication of ‘A Study in Scarlet’. Jephson is a prototype Watson: both narrators are doctors (as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... classic agrarian memoir by A.G. Street, was published in 1932. The traditional mixed farm where Arthur Street spent his boyhood in the first decade of the 20th century was the centre of a self-sufficient community, stout in defence of the four-course rotation and despising anything shop-bought. There was a ‘spaciousness and an aura of solid ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by real-life evidence. Thus: ‘When the young Paul Morel goes out, it is with his younger brother Arthur; they are “the lads”. When Lawrence went out to play, it would have been with [his sister] Ada.’ Or: ‘Lydia Lawrence’s reaction to her husband probably had far more in common with the revulsions of Mrs Morel than with the sexual theories of ...”

“... not use oxygen, and when it was taken along in 1922 Mallory called it a ‘damnable heresy’ and Arthur Hinks thought that ‘only rotters’ would use it. Among the rotters was George Finch, who was supposed to lead one climbing party with the apparatus while Mallory and Howard Somervell went without it. Events conspired to prevent this happening, and the ...”

“... appended to the novel, he referred to this opusculum of 1939 as the product of ‘the first little throb of Lolita’, and added that its ‘anonymous nymphet’ was ‘basically the same lass’ as Dolores Haze. At the time he supposed the story to have been lost, indeed claimed to have destroyed it: but a copy turned up soon afterwards, and in 1959 he ...”

“... he found the Scandinavian Astrid (a woman of ‘generous affection’) and her ‘rather dotty little friend’ Julia (who is at least once given as ‘Julie’ – it must have been difficult for the author to keep track of all the pseudonyms). The entanglement with Julia is described at length, with a not ungrateful memory of the pain inflicted by the ...”

“... work over the preceding months, disillusioned, scared by the violence, or starved back (miners got little strike pay and no state help, since it wasn’t held by the courts to be an ‘official’ strike). Both books agree that Margaret Thatcher’s eventual victory enabled her to consolidate a free-market programme of deregulation that would soon merge with ...”

“... ranks and denouncing the mob; while the counter-view of denunciation as betrayal was presented in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955), the story of a docker who turns in his wife’s cousins as illegal immigrants. If occasional denunciation is part of the everyday life of all societies, there are times when it runs riot, as it did in the Soviet ...”

“... international seminars, where priggishness takes more unnatural and exclusive forms. Yet little of this helps the poor biographer. S/he can lay out all the ‘bobs and trinkets of criticism’ – Tristram’s own phrase. But none of it goes very far to illuminate the equally strange life Sterne led, parallel in its strangeness to the books, but ...”

“... is hardly a matter of doubt. The testimony of a group broad enough to include Charles Masterman, Arthur Ponsonby, Father Bernard Vaughan and Arnold White cannot be dismissed out of hand. It would be implausible to suggest that this relaxation in the moral climate had absolutely no effect on politics. Churchill had the imminent prospect of office when late in ...”

“... become a crack addict and is in and out of prison. Dylan returns to New York, where he runs into Arthur Lomb, a white boy from junior school who later became friends with both Mingus and Robert Woolfolk. Arthur, who as a teenager clung to the coat tails of the black kids, is still living in Gowanus (or Boerum Hill, as it ...”

“... acceptable, at least within the confines of our television sets, and as a result perhaps beyond. Arthur Daley and his ‘Minder’, for example, are commonly regarded as harmless, comic, lovable folk heroes, who can be forgiven even if they do sometimes wander onto the wrong side of the law, and get in trouble with ‘the Bill’. Indeed, both George Cole ...”