“... And yet, as the doctor and everybody else kept saying, depression was not madness. It would lift. Light would return. But when? The young sympathetic doctor from the local practice could not say. The senior partner, whom we had first consulted, was a distinguished looking figure, silver-haired, loud-talking, a Rotarian and pillar of the ...”

“... redeemed by a vision on the eastern horizon of the towers of Lincoln Cathedral, caught in the late light of the setting sun. It’s the kind of thing that would have immensely excited me as a boy (and quite excites me now). I’ve driven up and down this road hundreds of times and never seen it before, but that’s because in a coach you’re hoisted above the ...”

“... beneath the barred windows of the convent that called up visions of the Stalag and the search-light and which had caused us to dub him ‘The Christ of Colditz’. Miss Shepherd, not looking un-crucified herself, was standing by her vehicle in an attitude with which I was to become very familiar, left arm extended with the palm flat against the side of ...”

“... a painter whom she fell for over a bottle of vodka when he was brown in white trousers. With Alan Sharp, a novelist and playwright: Alan arrives at 6.30. A hearty discussion on Anglo-Saxon dictionerys. At eight a meal. Bed. Then chat on the novel in English life. Then Salvation Army lore, then a whole two hours of ...”

“... collection and what happened to it would have been welcome.And then there is the first-born son, Alan Clark, the military historian and Tory politician. To find this ferocious attack dog prowling in the castle where once the author of Civilisation delivered his ‘credo’ and paused to pat, with pensive benevolence, a sculpture of a mother and child by ...”

“... after the first fire, and reservations continue to be voiced, notably by the Glasgow architect Alan Dunlop, a trenchant critic of the present regime at the school. But a Strategic Outline Business Case commissioned by the GSA concluded that reconstruction was viable – the walls remain largely intact – and in 2022 the art school launched a competition ...”

“... and Archbishop McQuaid’s poison pen, but makes a considerable satirical success of the scene. ‘Alan C. Breeze had returned from England with a set of false teeth, which he claimed to have belonged to T.S. Eliot.’ The better to bite her with, no doubt. A married woman, she then went off to London, which owned a little Dublin of its own as far as hard ...”

“... time: correspondances, corridors, traipsing. Took us about half an hour to reach nearby Bastille. Light lunch in first brasserie beyond the exit, place de la Bastille. Taxi to Carnavalet – couldn’t remember name of street (de Sévigné), neither could taxi-man, who took us on a tour of the entire Marais before finally dropping us apologetically at ...”

“... which must be counted his ‘Newdigate Poem’ in praise of ‘The Benefits of the Electric Light’: ‘A smell of burning fills the startled air –/The Electrician is no longer there’). In later years he told Maurice Baring: ‘Verse is the only form of activity outside religion which I feel to be of real importance; certainly it is the only form ...”

“... to imply an unacceptable scientific tolerance. In a memoir published in 1955, a guardsman called Alan Roland echoed Winterton’s remarks of the year before when recording his disgust at the type of man he found hitting on him: ‘The police call him a homosexual – a too-pleasant term for a vile creature.’ ‘Queer’ was so much quicker and more ...”

“... fall into three main groups: the poet-critics (Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert ...”

“... it became a problem. Gallipoli has become one of those military cock-ups – the Charge of the Light Brigade is another – that the British seem almost to revel in, even to gain strength from. As Peter Cook said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ The general verdict today is that it ...”

“... animated film (the essay’s ostensible topic), but as the source of an irresistible urge to set light to stuff. Incendiarism galvanises mob violence in Strike; as it would also have done on two separate occasions in the Gold Rush movie Eisenstein never quite got to make for Paramount while he was in Hollywood. The mesmeric influence or ‘attraction’ of ...”

“... Rehearsing his part in a production of The Birthday Party at Scarborough, the young Alan Ayckbourn asked Harold Pinter for a little more information about the fictional character. Pinter said: ‘Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what’s there.’ It’s a good answer, and Ayckbourn no doubt took it kindly and got the point ...”

“... Zulus say of tyrants. They had their own language, their own customs and traditions, and a myth to light their way, a mystic Christian mission on the Dark Continent. They spoke of themselves as the bearers of the light, but in truth they were dark of heart, and they knew it, and willed it so.’ It is Rian Malan’s ...”