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“... that came to light last week – when a dossier of intelligence reports surfaced online alleging Donald Trump’s eccentric sexual exploits, a long-running conspiracy between Trump and the Russian regime, and inappropriate financial deals over sanctions against Russian companies – read like the plot of a spy novel. None of the claims made in the dossier ...”

“... Alma Mahler Werfel​ celebrated her 70th birthday at home in Beverly Hills on the last day of August 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black coffee or Alma’s favourite, Bénédictine (by the end of her life, she was drinking a bottle a day). In the dining room, an abundant buffet was laid out ...”

“... declare my interest, for Lucas has declared it for me: his essay in the Annual is called ‘Hardy, Donald Davie, England and the English’ – a subject certainly more wide-ranging than ‘the theme of rain in Hardy’s verse’. What he takes issue with is my book of ten years ago, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. He shouts at me a good deal: ‘Now this ...”

“... On 5 December 1963, the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, a man in Boston named Arthur Inman, having made several earlier attempts on his own life, managed to put a bullet through his head. A variety of chronic ailments and complaints had made him an invalid for nearly all of his 68 years, and except for brief excursions in his ancient chauffeur-driven Cadillac, he had since 1919 confined himself to an apartment building in downtown Boston named Garrison Hall ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he can recruit any socialist with a declared belief in Christianity, including Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury and Harold Wilson, and any Christian who has advocated a social role for Christianity – a rubric which would not exclude most modern Popes. If Bryant’s history had been less provincial it might have situated the ‘left ...”

“... of such lending that undid Northern Rock. As the American sociologists Bruce Carruthers and Arthur Stinchcombe pointed out in the journal Theory and Society in 1999, market liquidity – plentiful borrowing and lending, or buying and selling – ‘is, among other things, an issue in the sociology of knowledge’. Believable market ...”

“... Donald Davie’s critical arguments are often happily reminiscential, and his reminiscences are often happily argumentative, so the difference in kind between these two admirable books doesn’t make for any great difference of temper. The critical essays which make up Dissentient Voice: Enlightenment and Christian Dissent are an act of making good; they fulfil the promise and they repair the deficiencies of Davie’s earlier book on Dissent and culture, A Gathered Church ...”

“... the wind.’ Obviously this has something to do with the vacillations of his physical health – Arthur Cash brings this out – and maybe also with the pharmaceutical regime to which consumptives were exposed. However, there is a deeper existential pattern of causation, and that is the more interesting aspect of the matter. Somehow Laurence Sterne lived as ...”

“... it as prose, pausing for the sense and not hammering the line-terminations.’ This Golding is Arthur Golding, who published in 1567 Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated into couplet-rhyming fourteeners. Earlier in ABC of Reading Pound had enthusiastically exhibited excerpts from this work, and had added: ‘The reader will be well advised to read according ...”

“... other litigation. One of the most interesting interviews recorded in Conspiracy of Silence is with Arthur Martin, the MI5 officer in charge of interrogating Blunt after his secret confession and the granting of immunity to him in 1964. Penrose and Freeman conjure up a bizarre portrait of Sir Anthony waking from a night with rough trade, spending the day at the ...”

“... and Ipswich. On its southern shore, halfway between the two towns, is Pin Mill, a village where Arthur Ransome lived. The inn at Pin Mill is called the Butt and Oyster: through its windows you see boats that at low tide rest on the sandy, seaweed-covered shore. Some of them are flat-bottomed Thames barges, the type of sailing boat that once traded between ...”

“... not-so-hallucinatory scenarios of the steps to apocalypse, while the sabre-rattlers-in-chief – Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un – trade insults like schoolchildren locked in a brawl. Of course the threat of nuclear war never vanished. All that went away was the bipolar conflict with the Soviet Union, the theatre in which we feared the war would erupt. As ...”

“... had an insider view of Enron’s accounting practices. Had there not been, staff at its auditors, Arthur Andersen (one of the ‘big five’ global accountancy firms before its spectacular Enron-induced collapse), would not have taken the fatal decision to shred Enron-related records when they learned that the corporation was being investigated by the ...”

“... to see the conflict from the perspectives of the individuals most directly involved. Now Max Arthur’s fascinating collage of soldiers’ reminiscences gives a voice to a group who are not generally believed to have (or to be entitled to) one, while John Conroy’s account is that of a sympathetic outsider nervously learning the codes and concerns of a ...”