“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... instruments by which all the rest of culture could be held at arm’s length, seen in a clear cold light. From Heidegger’s and Derrida’s point of view, that movement was just one more effort at ‘metaphysics’ or ‘totalisation’ – one more attempt to give the perturbed spirit rest. It was also bound to be short-lived, for Language is simply not as ...”

“... clear, with tall north-facing studios placed along spinal corridors. The huge windows that light these studios may well have been inspired by those at Montacute in Somerset, the Elizabethan country house which Mackintosh had sketched. As for other details, architectural historians can enjoy themselves spotting the sources, mostly from recent ...”

“... stacks of books. This was Carolyn’s current reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid ...”

“... of his Thematic Catalogue, scrupulously transcribed, edited and introduced by Albi Rosenthal and Alan Tyson. The Thematic Catalogue has, as it happens, been published in facsimile before, but that earlier edition ‘did not, as does the present one, reproduce the blank but fully stave-ruled pages following Mozart’s final entry’. There are 14 of these ...”

“... senior librarian Keith Harrison; we can only be grateful. Keith, it transpires, is a leading light in an outfit called Librarians for Social Change. ‘It’s books that I’m into,’ says Keith. Keith is so deeply into books that he would like to see all racist, sexist and élitist literature cleared from the library shelves, so as to leave more room ...”

“... such things’? And then there were the one-per-letter put-downs of current literary rivals. Alan Ross, Amis notes in 1946, is being touted as a ‘promising young writer’, a designation for which, at this time, Amis yearned: A promising young writer. A promising young writer. A promising young writer. A promising young writer. A STEWPID LITTEL BOY ...”

“... very much proof. In fact, this has been a controversial view, especially since the appearance of Alan Macfarlane’s book on The Origins of English Individualism, and is perhaps the most controversial thing in the whole book. To many other historians, the 17th century is less an age of transition in economic matters than either the 14th or the 18th ...”

“... of Tchaikovsky’s sexuality became more widespread, and which Forster was to use in such a light in Maurice 15 years later – the ‘Symphonie Pathique’ as Risley, a character based on Lytton Strachey, insists. The 19-year-old Forster, however, remarks only that ‘the 5/4 movement was very noticeable; also a theme in the first movement, a fine ...”

“... already had in place all the measures required under the convention. But the then arts minister, Alan Howarth, argued that accession would still send the message that the government did indeed take seriously the problem of the illicit trade. Only a year later, Parliament passed the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003, which strengthened the ...”