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“... biographies since the 1990s, while The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966), edited by J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, were reissued in 1997 and supplemented with Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell in 2000. Gaskell’s image, too, was transformed: the married woman whose earnings were pocketed by her husband, the Rev. William Gaskell, gave way to a canny, adaptable ...”

“... with what was now being termed an ‘imperial presidency’ (the title of an influential book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, published in 1973, which argued that with superpower status the American executive was exceeding its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together ...”

“... on a coach-trip to Chelsea. He was forced to give up his valuables, which turned out to include a gold pencil, a silver ruler, a magnifying glass and five mathematical instruments. The inventory reads like a cross between the contents of Gulliver’s fob (he hung on to his perspective glass when frisked by the Lilliputians), and the items in Clarissa’s ...”

“... waiting to take us off to the GS&WR for Dublin. Behind the counter, in her black bombazine and gold chains, old Ma Coughlan, the toughest hôtelière between the Liffey and the Atlantic. Her good eye fixed on me like a cat’s on a bird, her glass eye amiably up to heaven, they say it was her late husband did it, I wouldn’t blame him. Her two fists ...”

“... who could not afford a car, but had enough for the speedometer and the rear-view mirror,’ Arthur C. Clarke would remember. They constructed a ‘coelostat’, a device to stabilise the image of a spinning star-field. It was made from four mirrors and the motor of Clarke’s gramophone; it worked, and was proudly displayed in the Science Museum. The ...”

“... vaunt and joust. Anyone who hesitates near me, these days, has to read me a chapter of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I am considering adding knight errant to the profession of railway guard. Knight errant means knight wanderer, but I also think it means knight who has made a mistake. Mistakes are made all the time; it is a human ...”

“... like Grand Rapids, Iowa City and Lincoln, Nebraska. She even gave a recital in a small and rackety Gold Rush theatre, now a private residence, just down the street from where I live in San Francisco.) The fortune she acquired by touring was immense. Yet she also seemed to supercharge, rather than deplete, her formidable life-force by means of this ceaseless ...”

“... the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test.’ Alchemy was the passion of the age, and nowhere more so than at the Court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. When Dee left for England in 1589, Kelley remained. His bruited alchemical skills brought him fame and ...”

“... the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ...”

“... an actor. John Wayne is the United States of America.’ O’Hara was urging Congress to strike a gold medal honouring ‘John Wayne, American’. It was 1979, and her co-star in films such as Rio Grande and The Quiet Man was dying of cancer. John Wayne: American takes its title from this Congressional medal. Once you start to look for him, he’s ...”

“... to describe as ‘development’. ‘Honey,’ Jagdish Bhagwati observes, ‘attracts flies; gold attracts diggers’; India now attracted economists.* Bhagwati himself is one of the cleverest of the many very clever ones that the country has produced. But he was at pains to explain in his glittering Radhakrishnan Lectures – which form the briefest and ...”

“... Injuries of Class (co-written with Jonathan Cobb, 1972) is as classically, tragically American as Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, only to my mind far richer. Sennett has portrayed other figures who are just as touching and historically illuminating: Rico, the successful, hollowed-out consultant in The Corrosion of Character (1998); Rose in Together, who hated ...”

“... that extended across Europe into Russia. When she died her great-grandson Albert Frederick Arthur George was five and not in the direct line of succession. Finding himself at the age of 41 seated on Edward I’s coronation chair in Westminster Abbey amid ‘the red, the gold, the gilt, the grandeur’, he was full of ...”

“... there, but he couldn’t imagine the people in them. From this height, it was easier to place King Arthur in the mist lapping at the Welsh marches, and Titania and Oberon bowered by those fluffy copses, than to populate the market towns with the real millions, one by one. The best you could hope for from a stranger looking down, an American or Arab or African ...”

“... lacked a crucial tattoo on his arm. He was probably in fact a butcher’s son from Wapping called Arthur Orton, who had ended up in Wagga Wagga, had seen the advertisements seeking the Tichborne heir, and had taken advantage of a mother’s grief. The story ‘had everything: toffs, Catholics, money, sex, mistaken identity, an inheritance, High Court ...”