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“... The family were Greek-Orthodox Christians, converted to Anglicanism in the late 19th century. When young Edward’s vertebral slackness got too pronounced for them he was packed off to America, aged 15. He had never seen snow, and was compelled to invent a new personality at a puritanical New England boarding school. A few years later he escaped to ...”

“... obscure even to make it to the Dunciad, can be plausibly associated with several pamphlets, whilst Arthur Maynwaring is emerging from the shadows as a regular antagonist with the major authors of his day. Even where no such individual can be nailed for the disputed attribution, it is an advance if one can produce evidence equal or superior to that which has ...”

“... a non-starter, whether as wit or gentleman, for ‘squab’ also means an inexperienced person, young pigeon or unfledged bird. Birds came in handy, you might say, in lordly imputations of sexual inadequacy, as when Fielding called Lord Hervey Lord Didapper. The Earl was giving Dryden the ‘scribbling author’ the sort of lofty treatment which commoners ...”

“... don’t exist. John Howard has shown worthwhile leadership exactly once, when after the Port Arthur massacre in April 1996 he led the way on gun control, but having said then that we shouldn’t go down the American path, he’s been treading it ever since. He has expressed nostalgia for the way things were in the Fifties in his home suburb of ...”

“... from more recent conflicts – in Cambodia, for example. The Guardian reported in 1982 that young Argentinian soldiers captured in the Falklands ‘had been convinced that if they were captured they would be eaten’ – a variant of the cannibal imputation previously used by slave-traders to dissuade slaves from escaping to other masters or foreign ...”

“... the King ‘a jolly chap’, yet felt that there was ‘not much inside his head’. But then, as Arthur Balfour asked him, ‘whatever would you do if you had a ruler who had brains?’ The condescension was unkind, but the criticisms were not without their substance. It is not quite clear whether Kenneth Rose is happy with the direction in which this ...”

“... in the towns and ports of eighth and ninth-century Europe. Now Richard Hodges, himself a brilliant young English archaeologist and an acknowledged expert on the English and Continental pottery of the period, has written a book in which he seeks to establish the fact of early Medieval economic growth in northern Europe by means of archaeological evidence, and ...”

“... Three governesses, ‘mistresses of games and pleasures’, are employed to entertain the four young sons of the Austeur family. Although they have individual names (Eléonore, Laura and Inès), the governesses work as one. When they are at a loose end they like to ‘stroll through the garden together’ discussing their favourite t0pic of conversation ...”

“... its former fallacious speculations’. Experts, their dreams foiled, were prone to seek revenge. Arthur Dobbs deliberately set out to ruin the career and reputation of Christopher Middleton, who came back from Hudson Bay with news that there was no passage to the west. Dalrymple’s exasperation found an outlet in two public letters he wrote against John ...”

“... with the further advantage of access to the mass of Mansfield documents assembled over 22 years by Arthur Vanderbilt, who died in 1957 just before retiring from his post as chief justice of New Jersey, has now written the comprehensive biography that Vanderbilt had planned to write. The well-known engraving of Mansfield, taken by Bartolozzi from the portrait ...”

“... life and this punitive regime was brutal. And then, when Blunkett was 12, his father died. Because Arthur Blunkett had been working after pensionable age – his employer, the East Midlands Gas Board, had asked him to stay on to train new employees – they initially refused to pay compensation. The resulting legal struggles his mother went through ...”

“... what to do with all those years of obscurity. Ross’s major predecessor as a Sterne biographer, Arthur Cash, coped with the difficulty by writing, in effect, two books. The first volume, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years, was published in 1975 and left Sterne in 1760, on the road from York to London, hurrying to embrace his literary destiny. We ...”

“... soon as a decade became a label, there were people who did not wish to have it stuck to them – Arthur Machen, the magus of the fantastic, although a paid-up member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, insisted to the end of his days that he was ‘no part of the 90s’. Others welcomed the affiliation. The 1930s poets owed their instant celebrity to their ...”

“... colonial authorities quaintly called them), I heard a story from some other marines. One day, a young marine had left his patrol to wash in a forest stream. He suddenly found himself facing a group of Chinese guerrillas led by a slim woman with a pistol. The woman looked at the naked boy for a moment, and then lowered her gun. She said: ‘My name is Lee ...”

“... to celebrate its rebuilding. Brave Enterprise was written by the theatre’s publicist, Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, who had moved to Stratford in 1925, after being appointed drama critic of the Stratford Herald on the recommendation of his famous second cousin, G.K. Chesterton. Born in 1899 in South Africa, where his father supervised a gold ...”