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“... his fame – A true wit wouldn’t hint it, much less crow it. Poor knackered Nicky thinks he’s Alan Coren: He’s just a wee laird with a twitching sporran. And yet it’s wise to give conceit expression – Within the limits set by the absurd. A boast might be self-serving like Confession But similarly festers if unheard. Much meekness stands revealed ...”

“... 3 January. Alan Bates dies on 27 December and we break the journey from Yorkshire at Derby in order to go to his funeral. It’s at Bradbourne, a tiny village the taxi-driver has never heard of, and he and his Asian colleagues have a map session before we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to snow and as we drive through this landscape of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more foggy and like a journey out of Le Grand Meaulnes ...”

“... anti-capitalist, anti-Communist or anti-American. That, at any rate, is the argument of Steven Alan Carr’s Hollywood and Anti-Semitism, an impressively researched and closely reasoned cultural history, which takes up its theme in 1880, 25 years before the appearance of the first nickelodeons, and pursues it through to the US entry into World War ...”

“... icy intellect, high idealism and cheap opportunism. Here is the very influential Professor Alan Walters, economic adviser to the Prime Minister, suggesting to the BL board that closure of the company would have a beneficial effect on the economy within six months: restrictive practices would be swept away, pay increases held down and our ...”

“... of the princes in the Tower though they avoided the smothering pillow. Stories, too, of the Parker Bowles family – providers of sexual services to the Crown. Brown tells Andrew Parker Bowles that she doesn’t hunt and doesn’t fish: ‘“Real intellectual, are you?” he said with a slight patrician sneer.’ One ...”

“... well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role ...”

“... you will be delighted to know that a pub in the Yorkshire town of Otley is to be renamed the Alan Bennett in your honour in order to celebrate Yorkshire Day.’ Fortunately this bizarre baptism is only for a month; were it longer I fear it would soon be reflected in the takings. The body responsible for this kindly gesture is the Otley Pub Club, which ...”

“... faces which come with a promise to add a few yards off the tee. Some golfers go further still. Alan Shepard, overlooked for the original Moonshot, commanded Apollo 14 and became the first golfer to play in outer space. After three hours on the Moon, Shepard had collected all the samples of rock and soil he needed; he decided to make the most of weak lunar ...”

“... and then to find myself after that in the pages of an anthropology text in the company of a Parker or a Taylor, that was a bit hard, believe me, Sir!In referring to Apollo and Alexis he means that he had dreamed of seeing himself represented in a modern novel as he could already see himself represented in classical texts. ‘I’ve always thought,’ he ...”

“... clerk at Helpston in Northamptonshire. In the early 1760s, she had a relationship with John Donald Parker, an itinerant Scottish fiddler and teacher who was working in the village school. On discovering she was pregnant, he disappeared and was never heard of again. Her son was christened for the absent father, and became a talented traditional singer, a gift ...”

“... to deal with the interests of the country according to your own fancy.’ Enter Sir William Parker, who proved equally headstrong, pushed up the Yangtse to capture Nanking and compelled the Chinese to more humiliating terms, including the permanent surrender of Hong Kong. In the Second Opium (or Arrow) War, the British bombarded and captured Canton and ...”

“... showrunner of Showtime’s comedy Weeds (2005-12), was barely on speaking terms with Mary-Louise Parker, who played her lead, Nancy Botwin, a foul-mouthed, manipulative Californian soccer mom and marijuana dealer. Once Parker threw a script at Kohan and yelled: ‘My mother can’t watch this!’ ‘I don’t write for ...”

“... the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a ...”

“... of males, a character created from a mixture of Mr Rochester, Clark Gable, Casanova, the late Alan Clark MP, and – apparently – various dashing and extant English aristocrats, including Andrew Parker Bowles. Rupert Campbell-Black, wealthy landowner, sometime world champion showjumper, sometime Tory MP and sports ...”

“... All suicide, we are to believe, is painful, messy, undignified and inconvenient. Or as Dorothy Parker (an inveterate botcher of suicide) put it: Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. Britain’s policy of benign censorship keeps the annual ...”