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“... once told me, into the ‘working-class squirearchy’ of the South Wales coalfield. His father, Arthur Jenkins, was a miner, who went down the pit at the age of 12, worked underground until his late thirties, and ended as president of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, a Labour MP and Clement Attlee’s PPS. In a haunting opening chapter, Jenkins brings ...”

“... are determined to read the historical sources sideways. They read romances and ask why King Arthur had to be bled in public. They read sermons on lust and ask what these imply about dormitory arrangements. The drive of their collective work is to inquire whether the Medieval psyche was at all like the modern one, or was inevitably altered by lower ...”

“... the drawing of benefit much more widely acceptable (for instance, among middle-class students and young people) than it used to be. But the clinching argument against either a trade union or a ‘poverty trap’ explanation of the rise in unemployment is that the latter is a common international phenomenon. It would be quite remarkable if there had been a ...”

“... left of ancient Rotherhithe’. He stalked twilight zones, dowsing for echoes of Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen and Thomas De Quincey. We are commuters, he wrote, ‘struck by a quarantine whose extent escapes our measuring instruments’. After wartime displacement to Bordeaux, and the horrors of typhoid, he returned to a shuttered ...”

“... how amply each can enrich the other. Take, for instance, his excellent chapter on ‘Joe Gormley, Arthur Scargill and the Miners’. If all historians during the miners’ strike of 1984-5 had shown such balance, knowledge of context and willingness to face unpalatable truths, their profession might have done more to reduce the dreadful suffering that ...”

“... his death. The names were spoken with reverence in the Drum office: Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Arthur Maimane, and the photographers Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane, Winnie Mandela’s friend, now in New York; Can Themba, whose home in Sophiatown was known as ‘The House of Truth’; Casey Motsisi, who began one column, ‘No nooze is good nooze, but no ...”

“... this new Oxford Book cordially. Her ironical appearance in it follows immediately after that of Arthur Machen. Here the author of The Children of the Pool (1936) gets hot under the collar on the subject of psychoanalysis: From the simplest and most obvious dreams, the psychoanalyst deduces the most incongruous and extravagant results. A black savage tells ...”

“... here, since Hunt’s daydreams became Nixon’s nightmare, and somebody, Vidal thinks, forged Arthur Bremer’s diary before the shooting of George Wallace. Vidal’s analysis of the diary is masterly, and his tone is mocking, lucid, light. There is nothing quite as good as the Hunt essay in Pink Triangle and Yellow Star either, although one or two pieces ...”

“... important ‘in a country which has no compulsory military service’ if the physique of young shop assistants is to be safeguarded. And preferably such young men and others – ‘cabmen, carters and peasants’, for example – ought to be formed, under the superintendence of the gentry, into corps of civilian ...”

“... always flourish at times of economic difficulty. During the great depression of the Thirties, young men at Oxford were reported to light their cigars with five-pound notes. During the last war, American officers in London nightclubs were also said to favour this method, and more recently, in various underdeveloped countries, we are told that the wealthy ...”

“... our revulsion, but only some do. Sartre claimed in Being and Nothingness that ‘observation’ of young children proved they were instinctively repulsed by all that is slimy. It seems more likely he was universalising his own particular phobias. As Wedlich points out, young children will quite happily eat worms; only if ...”

“... question were not Belgian but those of Cologne, rung to celebrate the German conquest of Antwerp. Arthur Ponsonby tells this story in Falsehood in Wartime, a book intended to encourage scepticism, but the reluctance to believe the worst merely because it redounded to the discredit of an enemy may have had the effect of delaying acknowledgment of what was ...”

“... Two days after the announcement of the shortlist for last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, Christopher Priest wrote on his blog that part of the award’s purpose is to prove to ‘the larger world’ that science fiction ‘is a progressive, modern literature, with diversity and ambition and ability, and not the pool of generic rehashing that the many outside detractors of science fiction are so quick to assume it is ...”

“... Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could ...”

“... for long, as we can’t look at the sun for long. The film was over. There was a silence. Then a young man said: ‘That was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in the movies.’ And they all said: yes. The most beautiful. The best performance. Who is she? What else did she do? This biography provides a comprehensive answer to that question. Note how ...”