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“... name as Madonna? Could it be the teenage murder of a half-brother, the abandonment of his young wife to his enemies to save his skin, the execution of his closest friend, a blood-brother since childhood, by dismemberment, and (in all probability) the poisoning of his eldest son as well? This all sounds much more like Renaissance Italy than the ...”

“... to change the contours of ancient Greek literature. Between 1896 and 1907, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt excavated the ancient rubbish dumps at Oxyrhynchos, in Upper Egypt; hundreds of lost literary texts emerged, together with unprecedented information about the people who read and eventually discarded them.* Authors who had been little more than ...”

“... the completion of Dubliners, the transformation of Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the composition of Exiles and Giacomo Joyce, and the beginning of Ulysses. He returned briefly to Dublin in 1919-20, but by 1915 his artistic soul was forged. The Trieste decade, it seems, has not received its due. Ellmann devotes more than a quarter ...”

“... some two hundred pages – to Welles’s career before the movies. He reminds us that the young Welles was an immense theatre and radio star by the mid-Thirties. Radio had a regular peak audience of 60 million. Double-bills were interrupted in cinemas at 7 p.m. while a large console radio was set up in front of the screen, so that audiences could ...”

“... Krieg, and that their pre-emptive attack at Pearl Harbor was no more infamous than that on Port Arthur, so universally applauded in Britain and the United States, at the outset of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. In any case, the memory of Pearl Harbor has been blotted out for the Japanese, with the connivance of Anglo-American bien-pensants, by that of ...”

“... life. Others would be too good-mannered to notice things which embarrass Adrian. In the world of Arthur Ransome’s children parents hardly figure as characters. Their role is to establish the absolute security outside the plot which can make the adventures within it seem both realistic and safe. No possible turn of a Ransome story would allow ...”

“... thinks) disadvantageous terms. What keeps her going is concern for her ‘boys’. The elder, Arthur, graduates as a tax-inspector, immune from call-up, and marries his landlady’s daughter in Ulster. Cliff, the younger, something of an ‘odd boy’ who writes poetry when depressed, is called up and shunted from one arm of the Services to another. The ...”

“... are now virtually unheard of. Sometimes weeks go by without a meaningful vote. Many MPs have young families to whom they are anxious to return, and constituents and constituency parties expect a great deal more from their elected representative than they used to. Long gone are the days when an MP could get away with a quarterly visit to his ...”

“... classicism designed to negate the lachrymose effusions of the previous generation’s romanticism. Arthur Symons said of Gautier’s poems that they showed how ‘words could build as strongly as stones’, and wilfulness here carries the sense of chiselling designs out of uncut blocks, a description that captures something of Flaubert’s yelling out sounds ...”

“... of an elderly bibliophile. By the time of Holmes’s resurrection in ‘The Empty House’ (1903), Arthur Conan Doyle heartily resented his most famous creation, but vast amounts of cash had proved an irresistible lure. Doyle made no further efforts to bump him off; the best he managed was retirement. In ‘His Last Bow’ (1917), Holmes is called on to roll ...”

“... Eton and, by his remarkable wits, to Christ Church and the Bar. Upward mobility was available to a young man of talent, who soon ingratiated himself with the star of the day, William Pitt. Though he was an instinctive Whig, Canning’s ambition and admiration for Pitt took him over to the Tory side, and eventually into rivalry with Castlereagh. A reader could ...”

“... of the white pointy Klan hood can be dated precisely to 1905, to an illustration by someone called Arthur Keller for the play developed by Thomas Dixon from his novel The Clansman, in turn adapted by D.W. Griffith into his film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which featured heroic Klansmen riding across America in their billowing white garb. Life imitated ...”

“... now is simply an observation of the kind of times we live in and how attitudes develop among our young people. Over the last weekend I saw a movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was ...”

“... Spenser and Sidney. Both poems include fulsome dedications to the Earl of Southampton, a glamorous young aristocrat (he was 19 when Venus and Adonis appeared) who was also the ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This is the way ambitious Elizabethan poets got on in the world: they found a generous aristocratic patron, whose taste, praised in a lavish ...”

“... The Frenchman recalled a letter they’d composed after a consultation with the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen. ‘Could you tell Mr Arthur Andersen …’ it began. Andersen, the firm’s founder, had died in 1947. ‘They didn’t have a clue,’ the Frenchman said. They got a clue pretty quickly, however, and homed in ...”