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“... 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 ...”

“... the troublesome ‘mad Mullah’ of Somaliland, who was bombed into submission within a week. Arthur (Bomber) Harris was a squadron leader in the Third Afghan war of 1919, and pioneered the strategy of ‘control without occupation’ in Iraq, which entailed sprinkling fire on straw-roofed huts: ‘within forty-five minutes,’ Harris reported, ‘a ...”

“... in ideas. This was the world of Knaben3physik (‘boy physics’) in the 1920s and 1930s, when young men who had not been shaving for more than a few years were excitedly reading one another’s papers and poring over the results of experiments in Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen and (eventually) Berkeley. This was how Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and ...”

“... coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the ...”

“... the mid-18th century. For his part, Tharoor cannot forbear to praise the achievements of men like Arthur Cotton, whose Godavari Delta irrigation scheme remains much as he left it in 1852. Lalvani’s enthusiasm is winning, but his splendid list of British engineering achievements cannot disguise the reality that for far too long all the steel for rails and ...”

“... with the enormous Kingston estate now at stake, were long-established whispers that as a young maid of honour Chudleigh had contracted a clandestine marriage to Augustus Hervey, now Earl of Bristol. In 1774 the duke’s sister succeeded in putting a bill through Chancery to have his will invalidated on the grounds of his widow’s bigamy. This sort ...”

“... at every bed. The message was clear. If a cripple could become president, there was hope for these young men. Most of his staff were in tears. Yet Roosevelt infuriated almost as many people as he inspired. In 1932 the columnist Elmer Davis called him someone ‘who thinks that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a ...”

“... and blame its continuing presence more on multicultural ‘balkanisation’ (the term belongs to Arthur Schlesinger Jr) than on the white resentment which they, in some measure, share. Or in time-honoured minstrel tradition, new Democrats black up political programmes with African American cultural identification: programmes directed against the inner ...”

“... the story, and from other evidence, that it was the disturbance to the natural order that made the young Isaiah tremble and flinch. Other members of his family, including a much-loved uncle and aunt, were quite active supporters of the SR (Socialist Revolutionary) movement. Neither then nor in retrospect did he register any allegiance of that sort. Ignatieff ...”

“... of this kind only begin to occur about two thirds of the way into the novel, in Book XVII (‘Young America in Literature’), he starts out by deleting that and then goes on to cut Books XVIII (‘Pierre, as a Juvenile Author, Reconsidered’) and XXII (‘The Flower Curtain Lifted from before a Tropical Author; With Some Remarks on the Transcendental ...”

“... by a friend’s small press, it’s an apprentice work about a day in the life of a disturbed young literary man, Arthur Maxley, whose psychological problems seem at first to centre on his father (‘Father, Father, Father, he said to himself. What an ugly word’). In the end, it’s revealed that his bipolar ...”

“... John Francis Byrne, on whom he based the character of Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new volume of annotations to Ulysses, ‘he returned with his friend J.F. Byrne late at night to Byrne’s house at 7 Eccles ...”

“... plots it’s usually the men who have to face the moral consequences of unplanned pregnancies – Arthur Seaton, for instance, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Michael Caine’s Alfie – while the women suffer, from their men as much as their abortions. The moral question faced by these men, who until now have been indiscriminately handing round their ...”

“... dominant in a dormant or an indecent sort of way for many years. These were difficult cities for young men with literary ambitions; they were places in which both the present and the future seemed like a hundred years of solitude. These three cities, in which three geniuses felt trapped, isolated and dismayed, made their way slowly, inevitably into the ...”

“... of their oppressors’ history: the destruction of European Jewry conferred moral capital on the young Jewish state in the eyes of the Western powers. The Palestinian claim of genocide seemed like a bid to even the score, something that words such as ‘occupation’ and even ‘apartheid’ could never do.This time it’s different, however, not only ...”