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“... distinguished by the most alliterative opening sentences I have ever read’. (‘Boom! went the bell of St Botolph’s, bidding her boys from book and board. Clang! came the curfew of Carfax, calling the citizens from counter and cloth-yard.’) From time to time Bernard would show up in Sussex and bark orders in ‘his military voice’ – he had others ...”

“... but in accordance with Joseph II’s draconian brand of rationalism: as well as banning corsets, bell-ringing in thunderstorms and the making of honey cakes, the Emperor had strictly enlightened views on how to economise on and sanitise burial of Vienna’s dead. In spite of this new and more accurate picture of Mozart’s life and times in Vienna, our ...”

“... Royal Africa Company to salvage a sunken treasure-ship off the Sussex coast, designing a diving-bell for the purpose, and going down in it himself. From 1698 to 1701, he was master and commander of the tiny Royal Navy ship Paramore, again in the South Atlantic. This was, it has been said, ‘the first sea journey undertaken for a purely scientific ...”

“... collection and what happened to it would have been welcome.And then there is the first-born son, Alan Clark, the military historian and Tory politician. To find this ferocious attack dog prowling in the castle where once the author of Civilisation delivered his ‘credo’ and paused to pat, with pensive benevolence, a sculpture of a mother and child by ...”

“... to issue a green pamphlet to instruct cyclists in towpath etiquette: ‘Two Tings. Ting your bell twice … pass slowly, be nice!’ And there followed a long list of rules for the peloton to ignore. Rules for bridges, for bends, for wildlife habitats. You might as well hand out copies of the Highway Code on the grid of a Formula One Grand Prix. Ting ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst​ ’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the past, social nuance, music, sensation both sexual and otherwise, buildings inside and out, the inner life of sentences – this is only the beginning of a list ...”

“... and Bohemia, made women fashionable, the questions of what and how they thought and felt piquant. Alan Dent’s biography of Mrs Patrick Campbell quotes an expression by George Cornwallis-West of the excitement generated: ‘people flocked to see a play written by one brilliant woman and produced by another.’ He was writing of the year 1909; the playwright ...”

“... to him. Bevin was uncomplexed as well as uncomplicated, and his instincts were as sound as a Bow bell. He could not find it in himself to dislike the upper classes: ‘They may be an abuse, but they are often as like as not intelligent and amusing.’ But he couldn’t stand the middle classes. This clarity of definition surrounds the man and his ...”

“... It’s not easy to put aside our knowledge and inhabit their innocence. In The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst went to some trouble to shake the patronising certainty of retrospect, setting the first part of his novel before the First World War, the second part in the 1920s. Readers had to piece together what had happened in the interval, a lesser ...”

“... the paper’s readers, and elicited the largest number of indignant letters, was written by John. Alan Sokal, a professor of mathematics at UCL and physics at NYU, had gone into battle against the postmodern theorists whom he accused – I’m simplifying but not greatly – of having no understanding of the concepts they borrowed from science, and no respect ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Coser. And perhaps most enduring in their contribution, if only because they partook of all wings and of none, the Europeanised cultural and literary Modernists such as Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Harold Rosenberg and, to a ...”

“... Monty Python sketch about an obscure island completely inhabited by men sounding and looking like Alan Whicker. They paced to and fro, droning horribly and trailing microphones. It was, as Barnes pointed out, impossible for Whicker to have missed the item, or the point. Yet on his very next appearance there he was, pacing about and droning horribly and ...”

“... early at the old Baltimore and Potomac depot ...’ (He was, of course, shot: Alexander Graham Bell rigged up an electrical machine which failed to find the position of the bullet.) ‘At about the time the Roentgens were celebrating their last quiet Christmas outside the limelight in 1895, young Tolman Cunnings was losing an argument in a Canadian ...”

“... Plath’s is clear from the use of clothes in her own writing. Watt includes a passage from The Bell Jar but not the one where Plath’s narrator, increasingly unable to inhabit the personality she has tried to assume, comes to resent her fashionable clothes, which take on a ‘separate, mulish identity’. One night she throws them off the roof of her ...”