“... of charm. ‘Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me,’ he wrote to Alan Schneider in 1956, ‘in fact I feel much more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.’ The occasion was the mortifying flop of the first American Godot, directed by ...”

“... no reason: yet is always correct and just in his remarks. He is low in stature – long visage – light hair – coarse features – ungaitly – awkward – is a fiddler – loves ale – likes the girls– somewhat idle, – hates work. As Bate says, this is condescending, but it also shows ‘terrific enthusiasm’. The last sentence of Drury’s ...”

“... Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that ...”

“... balance’.                                          Alan Halsey To make a true difference, ascertain the turning point just prior to the terrain itself. Wefting and proof of particularised elements, panegyric as oscular traces, the trim sensor convinced. Aaron Williamson But before we can even embark on this ...”

“... the biographical enterprise set in train by his older brother, Bruce, whose memoir of Patrick, The Light Went Out (1972), prompted the first Hamilton mini-revival. Bruce was upfront about his brother’s drinking: his book is the source of the much quoted calculation that Hamilton’s postwar whisky intake rarely fell ‘below the equivalent of three bottles a ...”

“... Ego’ as we have come to know it in English, rendered literally in this new translation by Alan Bance as the ‘I’ (together with the ‘It’ and – an odd hybrid – the ‘Super-I’). In ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, much the longest of the 11 papers on therapeutic technique collected here under the title Wild Analysis, Freud describes how ...”

“... a disaster. This is what first bound together Ranelagh’s galère, ranging from Keith Joseph to Alan Walters, from Alfred Sherman to Denis Thatcher: the Institute of Economic Affairs competing the while with Enoch Powell for the role of the enduring spiritual godfather whose time had come. Ranelagh’s book is badly organised. Having begun as an attempt to ...”

“... and Tati. (Anyone who doubts the honesty and pathos Sellers brought to the part should check out Alan Arkin’s dreadful Inspector Clouseau in the eponymous 1968 movie.) Of course it must be easy to allow such memories to be erased by the succession of lazy, self-indulgent performances he turned out throughout the late Sixties and Seventies. By the time he ...”

“... Prussian manufacturing might do – and what it might avoid. He was also carrying out a little light industrial espionage. Under his influence Schinkel saw more of the factories and less of the country houses and historical sites than he had intended. The pair nevertheless visited Holyrood and the ‘Ossianic isles’ of Staffa and Iona. Schinkel’s ...”

“... thought, she is too eclectic and inconsistent in her methodology (as suggested by the savaging Alan Ryan gave her book on Mill); while to hard-nosed historians of political action, she seems altogether too preoccupied with ideology (as shown by the severe criticisms of her attempt to analyse the passing of the Second Reform Bill in these terms). For the ...”

“... than drinking probably polluted water. His reply to all discipline problems was a blow, heavy or light according to the size of the offender. On the other hand, he would have thought it shameful to eat on his own, from a private menu: he ate with his labourers. He rarely had any money, and he never owned a purse, tying all his coins into his handkerchief and ...”

“... I hung around with in my pre-teen years were always losing the head. During the good weather, the light nights, what started off as a game of rounders or crazy golf would end up as a game of clubbing the neighbour’s cat to death. A night of camping on the playing-fields could usually be turned into an opportunity for the wrecking of vegetable gardens, or ...”

“... at different times in his life hinted that he voted both Labour and Tory. This misses the point. Alan Bennett says he had little faith that Peter’s drink problem would be solved at Alcoholics Anonymous – Peter’s sense of the ridiculous would be bound to overcome him at the meetings. Similarly, he could never have joined, or with any consistency ...”

“... o hyd.                                            Alan Llwyd This englyn, as so often, is dependent on particular Welsh assonances, but in at least some cases, and certainly in Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Mabinogi, the achievements are accessible in translation. Consider only this brief extract from the technique ...”

“... twitching twat’. In his useful study of the US literary left, Exiles from a Future Time (2002), Alan Wald argues that Hayes’s ‘bitter meditations on class privilege’ had been transmuted into ‘untrammelled and misogynous violence’. This may have played a part in Hayes’s disappearance from public view; certainly his dislike of self-promotion ...”