“... Newton Minow and Craig LaMay’s book is not the first account of the history of the debates (Alan Schroeder’s Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV, first published in 2001, has just been updated and reissued). But Minow, as former head of the Federal Communications Commission and a founder member of the Commission on Presidential ...”

“... sinister memories; and Penda’s Fen (1974), a collaboration between David Rudkin and the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of Edward Elgar and King Penda threaten to unlock the secrets of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British ...”

“... Prima gave birth to a second daughter in 1962 and not long afterwards married the actor and model Alan Marlowe: he was queer, ‘a man I’d never fall in love with, so he seemed like a good person to marry’. Together they founded the New York Poets Theatre (they also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas ...”

“... hours, simple things, chords – really annoying stuff … She’d pull the curtains across and light candles around her and do this funereal singing all day long.’ The music manager Danny Fields was at her debut solo gig: she was ‘like a child discovering a musical instrument for the first time. She would just press one note and bend her ear toward the ...”

“... it has proved to be so in the case of Saussure. Kirsch, however, has one very dependable witness, Alan Ansen, who was soon to become the poet’s secretary. Ansen was an exceptionally alert, well-read note-taker, but he missed a few of the lectures, and for them the editor has to turn to the much less reliable Howard Griffin (who also, in his turn, became ...”

“... all of nature was a vast system of energy flows, an image made increasingly familiar by the new light and power systems of 1900, with energy ultimately to be identified with the favoured ghost of idealist philosophy, Spirit itself. Boltzmann found himself an increasingly lonely voice, battling repeatedly against the easy charms of energetics in the name of ...”

“... but unreachable world beyond mess and ‘undeftness’: His fees are large, his cares are light, His analytic eyes are bright, He glows with pride as well he might. The analyst is always right. Although several of Tessimond’s poems (nine of them, to be precise) begin ‘I am’, his work is rarely directly autobiographical. The ‘I am’ poems ...”

“... of prices, index levels and interest rates running across the top. ‘Diffuse, bright, fluorescent light comes from the fixtures four stories above . . . There are no internal walls to break up the space.’ The stepped amphitheatres – the pits in which trading traditionally takes place – are the floor’s dominant feature. In November 1999, when I ...”

“... neoliberal economy produced personal fortunes in excess of those of the 1980s, and what would, in Alan Greenspan’s famous phrase, be described as an ‘irrationally exuberant’ art market soon roared to life. Saatchi, the standard-bearer of the 1980s boom, was an advertising executive; his counterpart in the latest upswing in the art market is a hedge-fund ...”

“... he could no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life’. Alan Hollinghurst, in his acute introduction to this new edition, says the same thing. James thought he could, however, take up – these are Lubbock’s words again – ‘a story of remote and phantasmal life’. This was The Sense of the Past, James’s other ...”

“... any partner to them. Quotations from Lawrence, Joyce, the pseudonymous Laurence St Clair, Alan Hollinghurst and others, and Nussbaum’s extended commentary on them, provide ample opportunity (not taken advantage of) to have index entries for ‘cocks, soaping of in showers’, ‘erection, elephantine’, ‘genital organs, the calling by proper ...”

“... comprehensive study rather poses the question of whether there is anything left to say. ‘Alan Taylor has been the subject of two good biographies,’ Chris Wrigley writes in his preface. ‘Perhaps, in the centenary year of his birth, there is room for a third.’ Perhaps. But whatever commemorations and retrospectives 2006 brought, the rediscovery ...”

“... of curates and Edwardian ladies; prisoners of conscience; Anaïs Nin; Richard Crossman; Tony Benn; Alan Bennett. But on the whole, no. And yet we can’t stop ourselves. These days, if you’re a young writer and you don’t do your own weblog you’re something of an exception, and even for the amateur, the ‘journaler’, there’s now a whole industry ...”

“... Cahun, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Hildegarde of Bingen – as if to meet a new cultural need. Alan Turing, who now has a government educational scheme named after him, was not only obscure but disgraced for more than a quarter-century after his death. Hinton isn’t of Turing’s calibre, and Blacklock doesn’t oversell him as a pioneer, though he quotes ...”

“... In escalating, hall-of-mirrors, Chinese-dolls Stoppardian fashion, this observation throws light on the drama from which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern springs, and which turns from being the main thing to a subplot, becoming a play within a play. The echo of ‘home’ in the title of Hamlet begins to boom.These things alone would be enough to make ...”