“... and Macaulay’s interpretation became standard wisdom in the 19th century. As late as 1979, Alan Downie could open his otherwise still quite useful book about propaganda and public opinion under Queen Anne with the cheerful observation that ‘in 1695, with the expiry of the Licensing Act, state censorship of the press ceased.’ Few historians or ...”

“... of the subject. Seamus Heaney is one of its leading perpetrators. Another instance, this time Alan Hollinghurst on Graham Swift’s Waterland, is quoted by Lindsay Duguid: ‘The prose itself falls into a recurrent pattern of question and answer which imitates syntactically the historical inquiry it furthers.’ From Sydney to San Diego, the speakers of ...”

“... beautiful and I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole’), and the decisive contribution made by Alan Arkin, who had long coveted the role of John Singer, and told the screenwriter: ‘You gotta give me the part now ... I’ve gone to all the trouble of becoming a star just so I could play it.’ Arkin is clearly more fluent in Hollywood hyperbole than in ...”

“... a hint of condescension here. There are open seams in the plotting. Katherine’s besotted editor, Alan, works on her new novel, Consequences, till the last possible moment: ‘It had been a terrible wrench when he handed the typescript to his assistant to get it biked over to the Elysian people on that final afternoon.’ So the prize isn’t for published ...”

“... hard to imagine anything less engaging or novelistic, but the vitality of the whole, the sense of Alan Bennett characters filled with Old Testament fervour, was strong enough to blot it out. Towards the end of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit the narrator wonders what would have happened if she had stayed in the church. She decides she would have been a priest ...”

“... As Stalky & Co indicates, Beresford was a Ruskin enthusiast, and Kipling was the nephew of Burne-Jones. Hence, for Kipling, the first non-relative to offer him friendship and admiration in England was Irish, in striking contrast to the bitter repression at the Holloways. ‘Stalky’ (the future General Dunsterville) joined the two schoolboys later. The ...”

“... each other: W.J.B. Owen (1967) used the 1798 text, Derek Roper (1968) used 1805, while Brett and Jones (1963) combined 1798 with Vol. II of 1800. Now Mason appears, to reissue the text still available in Roper’s version – and what else? He might have gone in for a critical edition, condensing the interpretative debates, or for supplementing the notes of ...”

“... I Only Hope That Both Mother And Baby Die In Childbirth’), horoscopes, Vinny ‘Nutsgrabber’ Jones. Even the infamous ‘GOTCHA!’ is dusted down to celebrate the sinking of the poll tax flagship. However subversive their aims, however extreme their sentiments, the copywriters of Class War, committed to the task of selling mob violence as the solution ...”

“... having run away from the domestic constrictions of Portsmouth, she had worked as a clerk at Peter Jones, then in the firm’s furniture-painting studio, then as a secretary at the Medici Society, then for MGM as a reader. She used this period, the mid-1930s, as material for the best of her novels outside the trilogies, The Doves of Venus (1955). ‘Stevie ...”

“... time-bomb’ scenario, used often in 24, given pseudo-credibility by the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, and produced time and again as an example of the ‘what if’ situation in which lives can be saved only by getting vital information out of a terrorist before a set period has elapsed. Phillips reminds us that the first use of this scenario was ...”

“... at a set time in the future. None of the usual market-moving factors had caused the excitement. Alan Greenspan hadn’t said anything; neither the dollar nor the stock market had suddenly plunged or soared. Instead, a trader had started using the lid of a large plastic tub as a frisbee. The lull of that morning in 1999 was temporary: the markets were quiet ...”

“... vanished into thin air, both victims of the metastatic crisis in mortgage securities. The Dow Jones plunged five hundred points on 15 September, its worst day since 9/11, and nearly another five hundred two days later, even though the US government had bailed out the insurance giant AIG the day before in yet another act of socialised capitalism whereby ...”

“... beach. ‘People feel angry with the port because it is rich and they are poor,’ says Joanna Jones, co-founder of Dover Arts Development. She suspects that the ease with which local people used to be able to find steady jobs may have sapped their spirit of entrepreneurship. Twenty years ago, Dover was still a reasonably thriving industrial and garrison ...”

“... should be finally discredited. Writing about the centenary of the Fabian Society, Gareth Stedman Jones recently made the simple yet profound observation that ‘in no other country is it easy to imagine a socialist association able to celebrate a hundred years of continuous existence’ and suggested that this achievement ‘owes as much to the stability and ...”

“... she got to England with her small son, Peter. Writers, poets and theatre people came to supper, Alan Sillitoe and his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight, Arnold Wesker and his wife Dusty. Naomi Mitchison. Ted Hughes, Christopher Logue (whose recording of poetry and jazz, Red Bird, I’d bought with my pocket money at St Christopher’s), Lindsay ...”