“... than a dash of fiction or imaginative reconstruction. The late Desmond Stewart’s book (which Alan Neame, who introduces it, neatly describes as an ‘intuitive biography’) belongs to the second class. Though it draws on scholarship, it is not a book for scholars; his reading, though wide, was patchy (nothing written in German appears in his ...”

“... who recalls his summer as the little boy running between the secret lovers, Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Redgrave’s gaze in that film is watery and blank, which seems right for a man so psychologically traumatised by childhood memories that he had shut down his emotions. In retrospect, though, this had less to do with acting than with the Parkinson’s ...”

“... government rebranded Labour’s Child Poverty Commission as the Social Mobility Commission, with Alan Milburn as its head. Milburn gave a lot of attention to recruitment to elite positions – his flagship report was on fair access to the professions – but the commission’s analyses and recommendations as a whole were much more extensive, including work ...”

“... produced by its conference in December 1979 asserted that ‘our party forged with the strongest light and the purest steel had a decisive moment and generated the National Construction Plan … the communists rose up and the earth shook and as the earth shook the comrades advanced.’ At the 1988 Party Congress, held clandestinely in Lima, Guzmán said that ...”

“... it hadn’t already started, with a raft of more and less uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may ...”

“... crockery.In the main room of Yeats’s tower at Ballylee, with the shallow stream below and the light coming in at the green-framed window, I looked at Seamus and Karl and suddenly had a vision of a time when they would no longer be alive, and a time when none of us would be alive. At the top of the tower the sheer green of the trees gave out to other ...”

“... strangle her. That look, whose perfidious implications he understood, had just shone a terrifying light into his soul.Vautrin is at the heart of two Balzac novels – Père Goriot and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes – and plays a crucial part in another between: Illusions perdues. In each case, his sexuality drives the action: he fails to bring the ...”

“... the DFB €6.7 million, which was used to help secure the four Asian votes; this only came to light when he was later repaid via a Fifa account.As ever, Vladimir Putin was watching. In 2010, in advance of the bids for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments, the Russians drew up a dossier on each of the ExCo members, identifying who was most susceptible to which ...”

“... graphic novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with many others, want their work to be ...”

“... novels. Both are forgivable – or at least Alun is finally forgiven by some of his friends in the light of their own moral frailties, and Patrick, being to a large extent the empathetic, if not sympathetic central consciousness of his story, its ego if not its hero, can as little be absolutely rejected in the end by the reader of the novel as by Jenny ...”

“... return to Thatcher’s memoirs – not, I trust, in a wholly uncritical spirit – to look for the light that autobiography can throw on the broader ideological phenomenon of Thatcherism. For Thatcherism was a potent force in the displacement of one set of conventional assumptions about the economic role of the state by another set. There was both a ...”

“... William Empson was stirred to an opposite kind of ire by one of many hack works, The Traitors by Alan Moorehead, who ‘specifically denounced them for having had the impudence to obey their own consciences’, instead of understanding that a citizen’s duty is ‘to concur with any herd in which he happens to find himself. The old Protestant in me ...”

“... party, but explanations of the 2019 defeat that seem to have been held over from 2017 – such as Alan Johnson’s comment, within moments of the exit poll, that Momentum should be purged – are inadequate. At the very least, any inquiry should account for the drop-off from Labour’s performance in 2017; it should also try to explain the ...”

“... Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the grandness of the occasion with a score that incorporated blues and jazz rhythms, solemn chorales, and a triumphal ...”

“... sink’ allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental education. Together with ...”