“... figures in his life had turned his mind towards Marxism: his cousin Phyllis Kemp, and the composer Alan Bush. He signed up, albeit briefly, to the Communist Party of Great Britain before switching his allegiance from Stalin to Trotsky. British communists regarded support for Trotsky, by then expelled from the Soviet Union, as ideologically suspect, and ...”

“... though they were picked principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese ...”

“... and accepting suffering. He was filled with such hopeless gloom that he felt quite mad and quite light-headed. In fact it was just as he felt ready to sit down on the pavement and start begging himself in some obscure mimetic sympathy, that he caught sight of a luscious, enormous Italian cake shop ... His comforts! In at once he dragged Gokhale, who watched ...”

“... versions, not all of them concordant. By far the most powerful and distinctive is the work of Alan Milward. There is some irony in the fact that the country which has contributed least to European integration should have produced the historian who has illuminated it most. No other scholar within the Union approaches the combination of archival mastery and ...”

“... the Sticks’: Saturday June 15. An exhibition of fluorescent art, with sound effects and a light show, Wellington CROWTHORNE: Gathering of the communes in wooded park. Free food. Light shows, films etc. 11 a.m. ‘The College’, Crowthorne, Berks.Liquid light shows were ...”

“... of viral decimation, with breakthroughs commercial and institutional (or both, in the case of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize). At the same time the market for literary fiction has shrunk, and writers who were perhaps thrilled when bookshops began to have Gay and Lesbian sections were soon dismayed to find that their ...”

“... fought over dead emperor’s bloodstained sheets.Rasputin comes hot on the heels of Napoleon, Alan Turing chases Rasputin. So much loosely connected information clogs the mind rather than opening it up. There’s a passage in Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982, Janine where the word ‘poison’ begins to overwhelm the text: ‘Today the Prime Poisoner declared ...”

“... advance of Axis guns’, and who ‘from that time on ... could never see Pound in an unambiguous light, or think of him as other than the most problematic of poets’. Morgan goes on to describe his admiration for Pound’s poetry, his liking for the ‘bouncy, unrancid, echt-American Pound’ of Patria Mia, and his repulsion for Pound’s politics: ‘I ...”

“... And it remains pretty well known: the quirkiest testimony to its renown comes in The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett’s play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, when two of the wrinkles come alive and engage in a brief dialogue about themselves. As its furrows gradually deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard ...”

“... as ‘a minor, less rigorous form’. It’s worth pausing over this preference, especially in the light of a possibly failed career in alchemy. We can distinguish between what a person does well (does incomparably) and what he or she likes to do; and between achievement and self-perception. We don’t need hard lines of division, of course, and ...”

“... held secrets of Chinese porcelain, offering local supplies to satisfy a huge demand for fine, light and hard ceramic vessels that weren’t damaged by hot liquids and didn’t impart off-flavours. The combination of fashion and femininity in early 18th-century tea culture offered masculine critics a soft target. The tea table was attacked as ‘the seat ...”

“... since 2008, must have chuckled. At last, a New Labour reunion in the land of the free. All that ‘light-touch’ regulation was bearing rich fruit. Virtually every senior member of the Blair and Brown cabinets went to work for a corporation that had benefited from their policies. The former health secretary ...”

“... start with Konrad Heiden’s, written in Hitler’s lifetime, and go on through the works of Alan Bullock, Eberhard Jäckel and Joachim Fest to reach Ian Kershaw and now Ullrich’s large, steady book – again, the first of two projected volumes. So is it really Hitler’s personality and private life that we still need to know about? Who he was, and ...”

“... in interiors being ‘very Buckinghamshire’ and her mother’s alleged failure to adhere to Alan Ross’s snobs’ charter on U and non-U. The Middletons have been further mocked for having commissioned a coat of arms. Certain patterns of behaviour recur. With a sure populist instinct Diana gave the people what she wanted to give them in controlled ...”

“... perhaps what nasty things can go on in what Margaret Thatcher’s well-bred Minister of State, Alan Clark, tastefully described as Bongo Bongo Land. They should read this, from Kochan and Whittington’s little book: ‘BCCI made hay out of the London connection. Arabs from the newly-enriched Gulf States came to the UK to enjoy the casinos, buy ...”