“... 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 ...”

“... on the page, as if Houellebecq has lost belief in the entire project and is writing a little light porn to amuse himself. It just so happens that, besides being young, rich and sexually ravenous, and having ‘superb breasts, round and high, so swollen and firm that they looked artificial’, Valérie swings both ways. Every young boy’s dream. It may ...”

“... were right-wing – or became so – and it is hard to think of many caring novelists making light of a crisis in Abyssinia. Posh people had more jokes just as they had more teacups, and when they sat down to write both were in evidence. More than that, however, the posh aesthetic appeals to readers who want life’s profundities to scatter on the wind ...”

“... rise architectural attack on London. His wish to put the record straight made him, in the critic Alan Powers’s words, ‘an angry old man, not a grand old man’. After he finally closed his office, and to ensure that his claims would not be forgotten, he lodged five hundred boxes of his papers with the archive of the RIBA. Nigel Warburton is not an ...”

“... with the murder of one of them, but in spite of clear direction from an upright Scottish judge, Alan Ker, the grand jury of local property-owners would not indict him. This pattern was repeated in the attempts that followed to bring Eyre and some of his officers to justice in England. In recounting the public row that erupted in England, from a large range ...”

“... together’); they are strangling the world in cables as well as glueing it up, but are also light enough and insidious enough to dart between brains and poison raindrops. The scenario might have seemed twee and over-familiar – middle-class person escapes to the countryside to find himself – were it not for Buckmaster’s madness, and his desire to ...”

“... Andrew Adonis’s crisp and affectionate Life with any other impression. Adonis is naturally more light-footed than Alan Bullock was in his three-volume masterwork on Bevin (Bullock only allotted Hitler a single, though memorable, volume), but the picture he presents is much the same. Bevin’s achievements are simply so ...”

“... have any reputation outside this country.Moore was an anomaly. He didn’t fade in the brighter light of peace but instead made an international reputation. Yet much of the material in his collected writings – like the answer to Russell quoted above – seems to be conciliatory, as though he felt he had been inadvertently gross or unnecessarily difficult ...”

“... May Day marches were enormous. According to the Sydney Morning Herald’s senior political writer, Alan Ramsey, the machinations had been long, intricate and expensive: ‘Nobody believes the Government was ever an innocent bystander in the Machiavellian conniving that went on in ministerial offices and corporate board-rooms ... in the two years since the ...”

“... about its title – and about what names entitle people to – the title has to be read in the light of the book’s epigraph. Taken from Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, it plays off, as epigraphs must, the title of the novel against the title that is the source of the quotation: ‘Mr Phillips and the Need for Roots’. Tarquin Winot, the now infamous ...”

“... at having survived soldier-comrades, known and unknown, and his emergence, subsequently, into the light of a history which continued nonetheless. (He began this last following a visit with Nancy Cunard to the Lascaux wall-paintings, themselves then newly come to light.) The two books in effect describe the political arc of ...”

“... some scab trucks through the gates, and the resulting bonfire of overturned vehicles gave a lovely light. In the next edition of the People’s World, the splash headline was a very Sixties one: ‘Fremont – In The Midnight Hour’. It competed for space with another, smaller headline, which announced the victory of Salvador Allende’s ‘Popular ...”

“... those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly employed on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the culverted Hackney ...”