“... than prizes. The best things are from the youngest contributors, such as James Campbell and Alan Hollinghurst, and the less youthful A.E. Ellis. Each here performs the same narrative trick, telling some resonant or portentous tale through more or less awkward or impercipient or blindly obsessive observers. In Hollinghurst’s ‘A Thieving ...”

“... speeches. On the preceding Sunday, the New York Times Sunday magazine had run quite a witty page of advice to winners, printing all the dull and conceited and hypocritical things that winners have been prone to say and constructing an all-purpose ‘don’t give’ speech out of them. And yet, on the night, speaker after speaker came to the microphone ...”

“... is from Peckham, where Damilola Taylor was murdered, and spoke prominently about that, so he and Alan Smith went to the school to express their condolences. This is exactly the kind of thing that English footballers tend not to do, so good for him. This was his first time back to Osaka since then. Mulling over what the photographer said about hooligans, it ...”

“... Frank. Then come ten pages of information about Objectivism, with bibliographies and a full-page advertisement – FIND or start a campus club near you ENTER essay contests on Ayn Rand’s novels – and an inside-back-page ad for yet another book. There are more ads and another intro at the front; then in the ...”

“... of the European Court of Human Rights. It hosted roadshow events around the country. Its 423-page report addresses the options for updating and adjusting the Human Rights Act in a thorough and balanced way.By contrast, the Ministry of Justice’s proposals are sketchy and half-baked. The major aim of the consultation, and the principal source of its ...”

“... in which to promote their own version of modern history. But what are we to make of a five hundred page catalogue of a major exhibition of a major artist which offers us no account of why his work is important? One possible answer is suggested by the clichés in Quinton’s foreword: ‘Constable Country,’ he writes, ‘is an especially evocative phrase to ...”

“... don’t like her. Fleet Street, which always disapproves of rape Despite provoking hot lust on page three, This time gets on its high horse and goes ape. In Scotland several men have been set free Because the woman is in such bad shape She can’t be called on to give testimony. The man in charge says it’s an awkward case. He’s got a point, but no one ...”

“... reporters. The following day there was a large pencil drawing of ‘Harry Houdini’ on the front page of the Chicago Journal. The trick Houdini learned in Appleton, and the association that began there between himself and the law, made him famous. The police gave him publicity and in return, as the National Detective Police Review put it, they got the ...”

“... copy of the TLS. And on top of being a great observer and metaphor-maker – a poem on a magazine page ‘swimming in a little gel pack of white space’; a freshly laundered shirt emitting, when shaken, ‘the sound of a flag at the consulate of a small, rich country’ – Baker can be entertainingly fussy about vocabulary. ‘“Panties” is a word to be ...”

“... Manservant and Maidservant in 1947, the first time that a new English novel had been given a full page piece to itself; and the editorship of Alan Pryce-Jones (1948-59), during which the paper ‘became a serious, modern, intellectual journal’, and developed its willingness to comment freely about world events, something ...”

“... more than one able biographer. Morrison received a full and sympathetic scholarly appraisal, while Alan Bullock’s magisterial biography of Bevin ran to three volumes. Dalton, abruptly replaced by Cripps at the Treasury in 1947, was strikingly restored to historical attention, in large part thanks to Ben Pimlott’s commanding biography. If Cripps’s stature ...”

“... have received little mainstream historical attention. An instant ‘documentary novel’ by Alan Burns sought to explore the minds of the Brigade in the immediate aftermath of the 1972 trial of eight alleged members. Various documentary compilations were produced by left-wing publishing houses. A play by Dennis Potter, which he intended to call ‘The ...”

“... Mercedes Hitler gave to Winifred’s son Wieland, or her present to Hitler of a manuscript page from Lohengrin. In 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler spent a week at the festival and officially attended every one after it until 1940; he also made many private visits. By then Bayreuth had become a year-round attraction for what Hamann calls ...”

“... they therefore bear some sort of responsibility. This is nowhere more apparent than in the one page Bunting devotes to the fate of Jersey’s Jews – or rather the 12 people she claims were registered as such by the Chief Aliens Officer. (Strangely, she ignores the Jews who remained off the record, including the well-known Surrealist photographer, Claude ...”

“... construction’ work like cancerous cells: once seeded, they replicate out of hand. Consider Alan Sokal’s hoax. In May 1996, Sokal, a physicist at New York University, published a learned pastiche in a special issue of Social Text, a more or less literary journal. Believing that some fashionable intellectuals have abandoned rigour for glory and empty ...”