“... 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 ...”

“... those who don’t already know, these biographical details all apply to the author of the novel, Alan Sillitoe. This is to be a candidly, if not straightforwardly autobiographical work. It is also the concluding volume in the series that began with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Arthur Seaton, the leading figure in that novel, has here only a walk-on ...”

“... a world with close relatives, the australopithecines, who were equally specialist vegetarians. As Alan Walker shows in The Wisdom of Bones, to view Homo erectus as a kind of missing link would be a mistake. Walker’s is a case-history of a startling find, the nearly complete skeleton of an African adolescent male Homo erectus, who died near the shores of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Regent’s Park when another stroller stopped and (with no sign of a cigarette) asked me for a light. I explained that I had no matches as I had not long stopped smoking, but caught as I stammered out this excuse a flicker of amused despair, presumably that someone could be so stupid. As I walked on, the true nature of the approach dawned on me and I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... if he did. Headlong is a novel which, like recent books by Julian Barnes (England, England) and Alan Hollinghurst (The Spell), treats rural England as if it was a domestic Transylvania, a place where normality can’t survive one uneasy night or apparently innocuous dinner party. Some of Frayn’s funniest writing here concerns not the country but what ...”

“... finished by Christmas. Beef of Old England’s off. You can eat cake. yeomanry horseplay fails as light relief. Despite the rapid switching of tones, the passage is broadly coherent. We begin at the Western Front in the First World War. Flanders poppies, Ypres, the invention of the tank, mud, ‘over by Christmas’ – none of this is specialist ...”