“... Merritt overheard one bystander mutter, ‘look how brown he is, he’s had a bloody good time.’ Alan Allport’s engaging look at the demobilisation of British soldiers after the war begins, in a sense, from Merritt’s feeling of deflation. There were five million Britons in uniform on VE Day, 90 per cent of them male. (Allport doesn’t concern himself ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst​ ’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the past, social nuance, music, sensation both sexual and otherwise, buildings inside and out, the inner life of sentences – this is only the beginning of a list ...”

“... I have described as a thing of the past. Let me single out five sets of problems that throw some light on how Marxist studies came to develop in the way they did. First, there is Marx’s ambiguous attitude to Hegel, reflected in the strongly divergent views that later Marxists have held in this respect. As observed by Russell Jacoby, this also corresponds ...”

“... has made to resemble his subjects.Parr’s form of observational satire is sometimes compared with Alan Bennett’s, but he is closer to Hogarth. Bennett can be sharp, sharper at times than some of his admirers perhaps notice, but his characters have depth. They are drawn with empathy, a quality that Parr’s images lack. And of course Bennett, like Parr’s ...”

“... language alone that numbers him among the masters, but it is what strikes you first. From Light Years of 1975: ‘On the stands in nearby orchards were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart ...”

“... the school holidays from Harrow. For a time his family owned Saltwood Castle, now the lair of Alan Clark and terrible with banners, but the pile proved to be ruinously expensive and the family moved from castle to country house. The Wall Street crash of 1929 obliged the young Deedes to quit Harrow and its unattractive headmaster Cyril Norwood. Deedes ...”

“... closed, across the waving arms and fiddle heads in the orchestra pit towards the bright yellow light of the stage. Posters on this scale were new, made possible by developments in colour lithography, and for Beardsley they were another way out of the illustrator’s dilemma. In such big advertisements the image had to be dominant. Text was merely for ...”

“... he’s moved.’ She ran ahead of him into the room. The old man lay back on the pillows, a shaded light by the bed. ‘You had me worried for a moment,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ ‘No. His face has changed.’ She switched on the lamp over the bed, the light so sudden and bright that that alone might have made ...”

“... changing; analysis at Bletchley had not found any discernible pattern. One night when traffic was light, two of the Cheadle computors sorted out the messages not by statistical means, but according to the style apparent in the choice of call-sign and found that this gave a coherent classification. Subsequently they were able to show that the size of a unit ...”

“... the words of God.’ Harsh truth must take precedence over hopes for loving forgiveness. Alan Bernstein has written a sturdy book on the history of hell in Antiquity; sturdy, in that there is no negotiation here between orthodox rigorism and soft liberalism: for him, history is the objective study of the past – making judgments is not ...”

“... A Sor Juana Anthology presents a selection of the Mexican nun’s work in excellent versions by Alan Trueblood. It successfully reflects the versatility of Sor Juana, whose styles range from spirited popular lyrics, some incorporating snatches of Nahuatl or Afro-Spanish refrains, to the learned conceits of her full-blown Gongorist manner. Particularly ...”

“... leaning. ‘For an accurate translation of Machado’s words’, Paterson refers us to Alan Trueblood’s selection, which gives, he says, ‘a more reliable reflection of the surface life of Machado’s verse’. I assume Paterson is not asking us not to read Machado, only to refrain from petty comparisons, and to treat his own versions as poems ...”

“... way of speaking). It’s now available to Anglophone readers in unabridged form, translated by Alan Verskin, who has also produced a detailed introduction and notes. The first mention of the diary is in an Inquisition document from 1639. There was also a copy in the 19th-century collection of a Jewish bibliographer in Frankfurt. On his death the copy was ...”

“... are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion. Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush ...”

“... and teach a little and possibly become a don, the memory of those lectures cast for me a romantic light on what is a pretty unromantic profession. Pares kept cropping up in subsequent years. As the memoirs and letters of the Twenties began to be published, it turned out that as an undergraduate he had been one of the group round Evelyn Waugh and Harold ...”